Keywords:
gamified advertising
interactive advertising
digital advertising effectiveness
ad avoidance
user engagement
PRISMA

  • Abstract

    Digital advertising increasingly struggles to capture user attention as content saturation, multitasking behavior and habitual avoidance undermine the effectiveness of conventional formats. In highly cluttered digital environments, users frequently develop ad fatigue and ad blindness, whereby advertising content is ignored even when it is visually salient. In response, advertisers have adopted gamified and interactive mechanisms that emphasize user agency and experiential engagement. However, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of these mechanisms remains fragmented across platforms, formats and theoretical perspectives. This systematic review synthesizes sixteen empirical studies published between 2015 and 2025 to examine how gamified and interactive mechanisms influence attention, ad avoidance and engagement in online, mobile and social media advertising contexts. Drawing on the stimulus–organism–response framework, flow theory and the Persuasion Knowledge Model, the review integrates findings across advergames, interactive mobile ads, augmented reality lenses, skippable formats and task-based units such as questvertising. The synthesis indicates that mechanisms involving challenge, narrative involvement, microtask completion, user choice, interactivity and perceptual immersion foster positive cognitive and affective states, including intrinsic motivation and perceived autonomy. These states enhance attention allocation, disrupt habitual avoidance and reduce persuasion resistance. The findings further show that design features such as game–product congruence, balance between challenge and skill and augmented reality novelty support favorable brand outcomes, including recall, attitude and engagement intentions. Nevertheless, important gaps remain. Most studies rely on short-term experimental designs, provide limited direct measurement of ad blindness and offer insufficient cross-platform and cross-cultural comparisons. In addition, the evidence base is constrained by the relatively small number of empirical studies available for synthesis. Despite these limitations, the review offers an integrated perspective on how interactive mechanisms transform advertising from passive exposure into meaningful user engagement and provides guidance for designing user-centered digital advertising strategies that address attention scarcity, ad fatigue and avoidance.

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Vongmahasetha, T., & Wittayakom, S. (2026). From ad blindness to digital engagement: A systematic review of gamified mechanisms in online advertising. Multidisciplinary Reviews, 9(10), 2026478. https://doi.org/10.31893/multirev.2026478
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