Hypervideo as a tool for interactive advertising

Abstract

The hypervideo is a selective, user-to-document, and external-exploratory interactive artefact characterised by a video backbone and clickable areas within that allow access to the desired information. Its use in education has been widely studied but there is hardly any research about advertising applications. We have addressed this gap by carrying out a content analysis on a corpus of 148 hypervideos in order to find out what brands and product types are using this tool, the structures employed, the commercial motives that they might fulfil and the appeals dimensions that are present. Our results indicate that high-involvement products with positive motives are the most frequent. Although a third of the sample can be labelled as shoppable, the majority satisfy the motive of information-seeking by explaining the product characteristics or uses. Sometimes, this information helps to decide which product fits the user’s necessities, as well as fostering the purchase. They present interactive structures described in literature, such as the vector and the tree, but we also identified others. Soft-sell type appeals, particularly humour and storytelling, are more abundant than hard-sell strategies. All in all, this research adds to a growing body of literature on interactive advertising and provides a starting point for further research on these types of videos.