Advertising Narratives: Transportation, Imagination, and Brand Storytelling

Éditeurs invités

• Eunjin (Anna) Kim, University of Southern California
• Robert Kozinets, University of Southern California

Synthèse

The proliferation of AI tools and digital platforms is transforming advertising storytelling into an adaptive, multi-authored process where narratives are created, circulated, and remixed across humans, algorithms, and channels. This raises critical questions about how stories function as persuasive and cultural resources when they are fragmented, personalized, and constantly recombined by algorithms and influencers. The special issue addresses gaps in understanding what makes advertising narratives compelling in this evolving landscape.

While established psychological mechanisms like transportation, empathy, and identification explain narrative effectiveness, these mechanisms are being tested in environments of short-form content, emerging formats, and AI-generated narratives. Simultaneously, cultural and ethical dimensions remain underexplored—including the role of authenticity, the risks of manipulation, the tension between entertainment and persuasion, and how algorithmic storytelling interacts with human creativity and consumer meaning-making.

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Thèmes proposés

• (Re-)Conceptualizing advertising storytelling in contemporary contexts
• Exploring AI-generated content that circulates alongside human imaginaries and narratives
• Moving beyond 'do narratives work in advertising?' toward 'how do they work in contemporary media environments?'
• Investigating the craft of advertising storytelling from the creator's perspective
• Revisiting narrative advertising persuasion mechanisms such as transportation, empathy, identification, and mental simulation in fragmented and multi-platform environments
• Comparing effectiveness of narrative versus non-narrative advertising approaches
• Investigating questions about authorship, coherence, authenticity, and credibility when campaigns function as adaptive or transmedia flows
• Examining how algorithmic and human-authored narratives interact to create or fracture meanings for consumers
• Brand storytelling strategies where advertising narratives function as cultural resources
• Researching the human craft of advertising storytelling built on relationships
• The role of retro-narratives, nostalgia, and other human and cultural elements in advertising
• Micro-narratives in TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts: narrative advertising strategies for persuasion in seconds
• Examining forms, structures, and impacts of influencer storytelling around the globe
• Cross-device coherence in narrative advertising across TV, mobile, and digital formats
• Algorithmic sequencing and recombination of story fragments and implications for narrative coherence and persuasion
• Brand integration challenges in short-form storytelling advertising and risks of the 'vampire effect'
• Tensions between advertising messages and social and political issues
• Exploring the dialectical relationship between brand storytelling and consumer resistance, skepticism, or counter-narratives
• Story fatigue and manipulation: consumer overexposure, cynicism, and narrative distrust
• Dark narratives: how persuasive stories may normalize harmful stereotypes or glamorize risky behaviors
• Ethics of AI-augmented storytelling and deepfake narratives
• Gap between brand narrative promises and reality in terms of truthfulness and accountability
• How storytelling in advertising creates context for identity, authenticity, and the quest for the 'real'