The impact of brand and product placements in electronic games

In an environment where it has become increasingly difficult to attract consumer attention, marketers have begun to explore alternative forms of marketing communication. One such form that has emerged is product placement, which has more recently appeared in electronic games. Given changes in media consumption and the growth of the games industry, it is not surprising that games are being exploited as a medium for promotional content. Other market developments are also facilitating and encouraging their use, in terms of both the insertion of brand messages into video games and the creation of brand-centred environments, labelled ‘advergames’. However, while there is much speculation concerning the beneficial outcomes for marketers, there remains a lack of academic work in this area and little empirical evidence of the actual effects of this form of promotion on game players. Only a handful of studies are evident in the literature, which have explored the influence of game placements on consumers. The majority have studied their effect on brand awareness, largely demonstrating that players can recall placed brands. Further, most research conducted to date has focused on computer and online games, but consoles represent the dominant platform for play (Taub, 2004). Finally, advergames have largely been neglected, particularly those in a console format. Widening the gap in the literature is the fact that insufficient academic attention has been given to product placement as a marketing communication strategy overall, and to games in general. The unique nature of the strategy also makes it difficult to apply existing literature to this context. To address a significant need for information in both the academic and business domains, the current research investigates the effects of brand and product placements in video games and advergames on consumer attitude to the brand and corporate image. It was conducted in two stages. Stage one represents a pilot study. It explored the effects of use simulated and peripheral placements in video games on players’ and observers’ attitudinal responses, and whether these are influenced by involvement with a product category or skill level in the game. The ability of gamers to recall placed brands was also examined. A laboratory experiment was employed with a small sample of sixty adult subjects drawn from an Australian east-coast university, some of who were exposed to a console video game on a television set. The major finding of study one is that placements in a video game have no effect on gamers’ attitudes, but they are recalled. For stage two of the research, a field experiment was conducted with a large, random sample of 350 student respondents to investigate the effects on players of brand and product placements in handheld video games and advergames. The constructs of brand attitude and corporate image were again tested, along with several potential confounds. Consistent with the pilot, the results demonstrate that product placement in electronic games has no effect on players’ brand attitudes or corporate image, even when allowing for their involvement with the product category, skill level in the game, or skill level in relation to the medium. Age and gender also have no impact. However, the more interactive a player perceives the game to be, the higher their attitude to the placed brand and corporate image of the brand manufacturer. In other words, when controlling for perceived interactivity, players experienced more favourable attitudes, but the effect was so weak it probably lacks practical significance. It is suggested that this result can be explained by the existence of excitation transfer, rather than any processing of placed brands. The current research provides strong, empirical evidence that brand and product placements in games do not produce strong attitudinal responses. It appears that the nature of the game medium, game playing experience and product placement impose constraints on gamer motivation, opportunity and ability to process these messages, thereby precluding their impact on attitude to the brand and corporate image. Since this is the first study to investigate the ability of video game and advergame placements to facilitate these deeper consumer responses, further research across different contexts is warranted. Nevertheless, the findings have important theoretical and managerial implications. This investigation makes a number of valuable contributions. First, it is relevant to current marketing practice and presents findings that can help guide promotional strategy decisions. It also presents a comprehensive review of the games industry and associated activities in the marketplace, relevant for marketing practitioners. Theoretically, it contributes new knowledge concerning product placement, including how it should be defined, its classification within the existing communications framework, its dimensions and effects. This is extended to include brand-centred entertainment. The thesis also presents the most comprehensive analysis available in the literature of how placements appear in games. In the consumer behaviour discipline, the research builds on theory concerning attitude formation, through application of MacInnis and Jaworski’s (1989) Integrative Attitude Formation Model. With regards to the games literature, the thesis provides a structured framework for the comparison of games with different media types; it advances understanding of the game medium, its characteristics and the game playing experience; and provides insight into console and handheld games specifically, as well as interactive environments generally. This study is the first to test the effects of interactivity in a game environment, and presents a modified scale that can be used as part of future research. Methodologically, it addresses the limitations of prior research through execution of a field experiment and observation with a large sample, making this the largest study of product placement in games available in the literature. Finally, the current thesis offers comprehensive recommendations that will provide structure and direction for future study in this important field.

Applied batch cryptography

The material presented in this thesis may be viewed as comprising two key parts, the first part concerns batch cryptography specifically, whilst the second deals with how this form of cryptography may be applied to security related applications such as electronic cash for improving efficiency of the protocols. The objective of batch cryptography is to devise more efficient primitive cryptographic protocols. In general, these primitives make use of some property such as homomorphism to perform a computationally expensive operation on a collective input set. The idea is to amortise an expensive operation, such as modular exponentiation, over the input. Most of the research work in this field has concentrated on its employment as a batch verifier of digital signatures. It is shown that several new attacks may be launched against these published schemes as some weaknesses are exposed. Another common use of batch cryptography is the simultaneous generation of digital signatures. There is significantly less previous work on this area, and the present schemes have some limited use in practical applications. Several new batch signatures schemes are introduced that improve upon the existing techniques and some practical uses are illustrated. Electronic cash is a technology that demands complex protocols in order to furnish several security properties. These typically include anonymity, traceability of a double spender, and off-line payment features. Presently, the most efficient schemes make use of coin divisibility to withdraw one large financial amount that may be progressively spent with one or more merchants. Several new cash schemes are introduced here that make use of batch cryptography for improving the withdrawal, payment, and deposit of electronic coins. The devised schemes apply both to the batch signature and verification techniques introduced, demonstrating improved performance over the contemporary divisible based structures. The solutions also provide an alternative paradigm for the construction of electronic cash systems. Whilst electronic cash is used as the vehicle for demonstrating the relevance of batch cryptography to security related applications, the applicability of the techniques introduced extends well beyond this.

Algebraic attacks on clock-controlled stream ciphers

Stream ciphers are encryption algorithms used for ensuring the privacy of digital telecommunications. They have been widely used for encrypting military communications, satellite communications, pay TV encryption and for voice encryption of both fixed lined and wireless networks. The current multi year European project eSTREAM, which aims to select stream ciphers suitable for widespread adoptation, reflects the importance of this area of research. Stream ciphers consist of a keystream generator and an output function. Keystream generators produce a sequence that appears to be random, which is combined with the plaintext message using the output function. Most commonly, the output function is binary addition modulo two. Cryptanalysis of these ciphers focuses largely on analysis of the keystream generators and of relationships between the generator and the keystream it produces. Linear feedback shift registers are widely used components in building keystream generators, as the sequences they produce are well understood. Many types of attack have been proposed for breaking various LFSR based stream ciphers. A recent attack type is known as an algebraic attack. Algebraic attacks transform the problem of recovering the key into a problem of solving multivariate system of equations, which eventually recover the internal state bits or the key bits. This type of attack has been shown to be effective on a number of regularly clocked LFSR based stream ciphers. In this thesis, algebraic attacks are extended to a number of well known stream ciphers where at least one LFSR in the system is irregularly clocked. Applying algebriac attacks to these ciphers has only been discussed previously in the open literature for LILI-128. In this thesis, algebraic attacks are first applied to keystream generators using stop-and go clocking. Four ciphers belonging to this group are investigated: the Beth-Piper stop-and-go generator, the alternating step generator, the Gollmann cascade generator and the eSTREAM candidate: the Pomaranch cipher. It is shown that algebraic attacks are very effective on the first three of these ciphers. Although no effective algebraic attack was found for Pomaranch, the algebraic analysis lead to some interesting findings including weaknesses that may be exploited in future attacks. Algebraic attacks are then applied to keystream generators using (p; q) clocking. Two well known examples of such ciphers, the step1/step2 generator and the self decimated generator are investigated. Algebraic attacks are shown to be very powerful attack in recovering the internal state of these generators. A more complex clocking mechanism than either stop-and-go or the (p; q) clocking keystream generators is known as mutual clock control. In mutual clock control generators, the LFSRs control the clocking of each other. Four well known stream ciphers belonging to this group are investigated with respect to algebraic attacks: the Bilateral-stop-and-go generator, A5/1 stream cipher, Alpha 1 stream cipher, and the more recent eSTREAM proposal, the MICKEY stream ciphers. Some theoretical results with regards to the complexity of algebraic attacks on these ciphers are presented. The algebraic analysis of these ciphers showed that generally, it is hard to generate the system of equations required for an algebraic attack on these ciphers. As the algebraic attack could not be applied directly on these ciphers, a different approach was used, namely guessing some bits of the internal state, in order to reduce the degree of the equations. Finally, an algebraic attack on Alpha 1 that requires only 128 bits of keystream to recover the 128 internal state bits is presented. An essential process associated with stream cipher proposals is key initialization. Many recently proposed stream ciphers use an algorithm to initialize the large internal state with a smaller key and possibly publicly known initialization vectors. The effect of key initialization on the performance of algebraic attacks is also investigated in this thesis. The relationships between the two have not been investigated before in the open literature. The investigation is conducted on Trivium and Grain-128, two eSTREAM ciphers. It is shown that the key initialization process has an effect on the success of algebraic attacks, unlike other conventional attacks. In particular, the key initialization process allows an attacker to firstly generate a small number of equations of low degree and then perform an algebraic attack using multiple keystreams. The effect of the number of iterations performed during key initialization is investigated. It is shown that both the number of iterations and the maximum number of initialization vectors to be used with one key should be carefully chosen. Some experimental results on Trivium and Grain-128 are then presented. Finally, the security with respect to algebraic attacks of the well known LILI family of stream ciphers, including the unbroken LILI-II, is investigated. These are irregularly clock- controlled nonlinear filtered generators. While the structure is defined for the LILI family, a particular paramater choice defines a specific instance. Two well known such instances are LILI-128 and LILI-II. The security of these and other instances is investigated to identify which instances are vulnerable to algebraic attacks. The feasibility of recovering the key bits using algebraic attacks is then investigated for both LILI- 128 and LILI-II. Algebraic attacks which recover the internal state with less effort than exhaustive key search are possible for LILI-128 but not for LILI-II. Given the internal state at some point in time, the feasibility of recovering the key bits is also investigated, showing that the parameters used in the key initialization process, if poorly chosen, can lead to a key recovery using algebraic attacks.

Integration of a road traffic noise model (ASJ) and traffic simulation (AVENUE) for a built-up area

A road traffic noise prediction model (ASJ MODEL-1998) has been integrated with a road traffic simulator (AVENUE) to produce the Dynamic areawide Road traffic NoisE simulator-DRONE. This traffic-noise-GIS based integrated tool is upgraded to predict noise levels in built-up areas. The integration of traffic simulation with a noise model provides dynamic access to traffic flow characteristics and hence automated and detailed predictions of traffic noise. The prediction is not only on the spatial scale but also on temporal scale. The linkage with GIS gives a visual representation to noise pollution in the form of dynamic areawide traffic noise contour maps. The application of DRONE on a real world built-up area is also presented.

Conifer defence against insects: microarray gene expression profiling of Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) induced by mechanical wounding or feeding by spruce budworms (Choristoneura occidentalis) or white pine weevils (Pissodes strobi) reveals large

Conifers are resistant to attack from a large number of potential herbivores or pathogens. Previous molecular and biochemical characterization of selected conifer defence systems support a model of multigenic, constitutive and induced defences that act on invading insects via physical, chemical, biochemical or ecological (multitrophic) mechanisms. However, the genomic foundation of the complex defence and resistance mechanisms of conifers is largely unknown. As part of a genomics strategy to characterize inducible defences and possible resistance mechanisms of conifers against insect herbivory, we developed a cDNA microarray building upon a new spruce (Picea spp.) expressed sequence tag resource. This first-generation spruce cDNA microarray contains 9720 cDNA elements representing c. 5500 unique genes. We used this array to monitor gene expression in Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) bark in response to herbivory by white pine weevils (Pissodes strobi, Curculionidae) or wounding, and in young shoot tips in response to western spruce budworm (Choristoneura occidentalis, Lepidopterae) feeding. Weevils are stem-boring insects that feed on phloem, while budworms are foliage feeding larvae that consume needles and young shoot tips. Both insect species and wounding treatment caused substantial changes of the host plant transcriptome detected in each case by differential gene expression of several thousand array elements at 1 or 2 d after the onset of treatment. Overall, there was considerable overlap among differentially expressed gene sets from these three stress treatments. Functional classification of the induced transcripts revealed genes with roles in general plant defence, octadecanoid and ethylene signalling, transport, secondary metabolism, and transcriptional regulation. Several genes involved in primary metabolic processes such as photosynthesis were down-regulated upon insect feeding or wounding, fitting with the concept of dynamic resource allocation in plant defence. Refined expression analysis using gene-specific primers and real-time PCR for selected transcripts was in agreement with microarray results for most genes tested. This study provides the first large-scale survey of insect-induced defence transcripts in a gymnosperm and provides a platform for functional investigation of plant-insect interactions in spruce. Induction of spruce genes of octadecanoid and ethylene signalling, terpenoid biosynthesis, and phenolic secondary metabolism are discussed in more detail.