Pop-up ads in online gaming is an emerging phenomenon on the internet that provide massive opportunities for business enterprises. Despite its importance for any businesses, do gamers get inspired by pop-up ads? To answer the query, we develop the conceptual model predicting customer inspiration through perceived advertisement value of pop-up ads in the context of online games. Based on the conceptual model, we first aim to highlight the factors that can motivate gamers to interact with pop-up ads in online games and gain perceived advertisement value of pop-up ads. After that, we intend to understand the impact of perceived advertisement value of pop-up ads on customer inspiration. Our study makes several notable contributions to the literature. First, we apply and extend Ducoffe model of advertisement value in pop-up ads, especially in online games. Second, we add audio and visual aesthetic factors in the existing Ducoffe model. Third, we primarily focus on predicting customer inspiration through perceived advertisement value of pop-up ads in online games. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.