Anyone who spends time on a smartphone has likely seen a mobile game advertisement featuring a player making terrible decisions. The characters repeatedly fail simple puzzles or walk directly into obvious traps. Despite highlighting incompetence, these “fail ads” account for a massive portion of top-performing mobile game advertisements.
A fascinating question arises about why promoting a game through continuous failure actually works. A recent investigation published in Psychology & Marketing was designed to shed light on this topic. The central goal was to identify the emotional process that makes watching someone else fail so persuasive to consumers.
Deconstructing the Drive to Win
Past studies have compared fail ads to success-oriented ads, but they left the underlying emotional reactions largely unexplored. Moon Joonhyun, a researcher at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in the Republic of Korea, led a team to investigate this gap. The researchers wanted to know exactly how different types of competitive traits influence a viewer’s reaction.
To understand the investigation, it helps to know a few psychological concepts. The first is schadenfreude, which is the feeling of pleasure or amusement derived from witnessing someone else’s misfortune. The researchers proposed that watching a player fail a simple task triggers this specific emotion in viewers.
The researchers also looked at two distinct types of competitiveness. General competitiveness is a broad, intrinsic motivation to engage in contests and try to outperform others. Hypercompetitiveness is a much more intense version characterized by an extreme desire to win at any cost to protect one’s self-worth.
Testing the Emotional Chain of Events
To investigate these concepts, the team designed two online experiments. In the first study, they recruited 241 people who regularly play mobile games. The participants viewed a sequence of screenshots simulating a pop-up advertisement for a tile-matching puzzle game.
The simulated ad showed the player completely failing the puzzle. Afterward, participants filled out a survey using a seven-point scale to rate their own competitive traits, their feelings of schadenfreude, and their intention to download the game. The researchers analyzed the survey data using Partial Least Squares (PLS) modeling, a statistical method that helps map out relationships between different survey responses.
The analysis revealed a specific chain of events. General competitiveness alone did not directly cause schadenfreude. Instead, general competitiveness was linked to higher levels of hypercompetitiveness.
This hypercompetitive mindset then predicted a stronger feeling of schadenfreude when watching the ad. Finally, experiencing that pleasure at the player’s failure was directly linked to a higher likelihood that the participant would want to download the game. To confirm this process, the team ran a supplementary test with an ad that did not show a failure.
In this neutral version, the advertisement simply ended without showing the player winning or losing. When the explicit failure was removed, the emotional pathway leading to schadenfreude disappeared. This showed that the specific content of the failure is required to trigger the chain of events.
The Role of Game Difficulty
In a second study, the researchers tested how the perceived difficulty of the game changes this emotional process. They recruited 247 different participants and showed them an ad for a zombie survival game. Half of the group saw visual cues and text claiming the game was moderately difficult, stating that 50 percent of players fail.
The other half saw visuals claiming the game was extremely difficult, with text stating that 95 percent of players fail. The researchers measured the same emotional and competitive traits as in the first study. They then compared the results between the two distinct groups.
The data showed that the chain of events linking competitiveness to schadenfreude was stronger in the moderately difficult condition. When the game looked exceptionally hard, viewers tended to blame the game’s design rather than the player’s incompetence. Because the failure did not seem like the player’s fault, the viewers experienced less schadenfreude.
Takeaways for Digital Marketers
For businesses and digital marketers, these findings offer actionable insights into designing effective advertising campaigns. Advertisers can intentionally incorporate competitive elements like timers, scores, or low success rates into their ad copy. By adding these features, they can trigger hypercompetitive reactions and increase the emotional engagement of their audience.
The research also suggests that finding the right balance of difficulty is important for user acquisition. Portraying a task as moderately difficult makes the failure seem preventable and deserved by the player. This specific balance maximizes the viewer’s feeling of schadenfreude and boosts their interest in downloading the product.
There are a few caveats to consider regarding this investigation. The researchers relied on self-reported survey data where participants stated their intention to download the game. They did not track actual app downloads or long-term user behavior in a real-life digital environment.
Additionally, this study relied on static images rather than full video files to control the experiment. Future research could observe dynamic video ads in field settings to see if these patterns hold true for actual purchases. Other industries, such as financial services or education platforms, might also be studied to see if minor mistakes in advertising evoke a similar response.
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