Novel features of interactive augmented reality advertisements and its effect on stimulating user engagement: study of Egyptian tourism advertising

Abstract

Modernity features, technological advances and economic conditions have added new challenges to the world of advertising and tourism promotion. In accordance with the current intelligent era and its special features, it requires technical development in the presentation of attractive tourist advertising ideas so that Egyptian tourism advertising campaigns are unique and different. It became necessary to find an effective interactive way to establish a close relationship with potential users for the purpose of motivating the potential user and to make it an authentic party that shares his senses in the advertising process to consolidate his relationship with advertising and thus the tourist service and achieve the elements of attraction and engagement. According to the development of the properties of interactive augmented reality technology and its unique features in creating a built-in environment that penetrates the spatial and temporal boundaries where the advertising designer was able to embody the worlds of tourism accurately in addition to many distinctive qualities such as interactive quality and dazzle and others, which helps to dipping the user with the advertising experience. The research used this technology as one of the dazzling tourism advertising solutions that help in effectively embodying the Egyptian tourism reality for users. This study follows an experimental approach using two ads implemented with AR technology and two traditional ones for testing two aspects: firstly, the capability to interactively integrate AR into tourism advertisements (ads) using a smartphone to increase the rates of user engagement over those of traditional ones; and secondly, the effect of an interactive tourism advertising experience on enhancing the novelty principle, This study proposed that, H1: the interactive integration of AR in tourism advertising using smartphones leads to higher rates of user engagement. H2: the impact of an augmented tourism advertising experience enhances the novelty principle. The results indicated the effectiveness of such interactive AR technology for increasing the user engagement rates and enhance the novelty principle.