Product placement in video games is gaining momentum as a means to target audiences in an indirect and engaging way. This study uses a 2 (high repetition vs low repetition) × 2 (high brand familiarity vs low brand familiarity) factorial design to test the effects of repetition and brand familiarity on consumers’ memory for brands placed in video games. Results suggest that consumers recall familiar brands placed in the video game better than unfamiliar ones. Familiar brands also performed better in a brand recognition measure than unfamiliar brands. As no interaction effect of repetition was found, both familiar and unfamiliar brands will benefit equally of the effect of repetition. Managerial implications, limitations, and future research are also addressed.

This research explores the narrative abilities demonstrated by children aged between 8 and 12 in the production of television stories. The results reveal that not all television stories viewed by children foster the informal education process. One type of story, termed narrativizing, enables children to produce coherent stories which clearly articulate the causal, temporal and motivational relations, as well as the means-end structures, the proximal relations of the intrigue and the distal relations of the plot. Other television stories, denarrativizing stories, tend to induce disarrangements and incoherence at all structural levels of the stories produced by children. This in turn hampers the development of their narrative abilities, which are necessary to the correct development of narrative thought. These results indicate the need to exercise social control over this latter type of fictional television narrative, to which children are exposed throughout their development within the framework of informal education.

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In the conceptualization of Educommunication, progress must be made towards the integration of its two great perspectives. Encouraging critical dialogue is a goal shared by both, so it is necessary to delve into its educational properties, methods and functions. A training model in Educommunication that has been tested through empirical research is presented. For two weeks, 246 children between six and eleven years old, attended training sessions with two types of audiovisual products. Half of the children were involved in a training process using critical dialogical methodology, whereas the training process for the other half of the children followed conversational dialogue methodology. The results show that children who follow the critical dialogical training benefit significantly in the construction of their media competence and narrative thinking, compared to the children of the conversational dialogical groups. The results also reveal that not all types of audiovisual content are beneficial to the construction of children's thinking. This research reveals the properties of the proposed critical dialogical method that allows children to improve their media competence and illustrates the complementarity between the diagnostic-static process of competences and the formative-dynamic process that leads to critical thinking. From an applied point of view, the critical dialogical method has been useful for use by teachers to foster a media education in their group of students that contributes to the development of narrative thinking. En la conceptualización de la Educomunicación se ha de avanzar hacia la integración de sus dos grandes perspectivas. Fomentar el diálogo crítico es un objetivo compartido por ambas, por lo que es preciso profundizar en sus propiedades, métodos y funciones educativas. Se presenta un modelo formativo en educomunicación que ha sido testado mediante una investigación empírica. Durante dos semanas, 246 niños entre seis y once años asisten a sesiones formativas con dos tipos de productos audiovisuales. La mitad de los niños sigue un proceso formativo según la metodología dialógico-crítica y la otra mitad una metodología de diálogo-conversacional. Los resultados muestran que los niños que siguen la formación dialógico-crítica se benefician significativamente en la construcción de su competencia mediática y pensamiento narrativo, en comparación con los niños de los grupos dialógico-conversacional. Los resultados revelan también que no todos los tipos de contenidos audiovisuales son beneficiosos para la formación del pensamiento del niño. Esta investigación pone de manifiesto cuáles son las propiedades del método dialógico-crítico propuesto que permiten al niño mejorar su competencia mediática e ilustra la complementariedad entre el proceso de diagnóstico-estático de competencias y el proceso formativo-dinámico que conduce al pensamiento crítico. Desde un punto de vista aplicado, este método ha mostrado su utilidad para ser utilizado por el profesor para fomentar en su grupo de alumnos una educación mediática que contribuya al desarrollo del pensamiento narrativo.