How Story Plot Affect The Effect Of Short Video Marketing

With the development of short video applications,watching short video has become a popular form of entertainment.Both in terms of user size and consumption duration,short video applications have fully occupied daily life of the public,providing favorable conditions for the creation and delivery of advertisements.Therefore,it is very meaningful to study short video advertisements.However,in short video applications where users have independent viewing rights,not all short video advertisements can attract users’ attention and achieve marketing results.As an effective marketing method,story marketing can attract the attention of the audience,so it is very necessary to study the story marketing of short video advertisements.In order to better achieve the marketing purpose of short video advertising,this study conducted a study about story plot.The specific research questions are:(1)What are the characteristics of story plot in short video advertising that are important to the audience?That is,how to design story plot to better achieve marketing results?(2)What is the mediating mechanism by which the relevant factors of the story plot affect the effectiveness of short video advertising?In this study,in-depth interviews and questionnaires were used.First,we conducted in-depth interviews with 16 target users,and then combined with existing literature,we summarized six relevant variables of the story plot that the audience pays attention to,namely plot reversal,plot humor,plot integrity,plot authenticity,plot connection,and plot familiarity,which laid the foundation for study 2.Then,in Study 2,using narrative transportation as a theory,we explored the mediating mechanism that story plot related variables affect the effect of short video advertising.402 valid samples were collected through a questionnaire survey.The video materials in the questionnaire were from Douyin short videos.Then SPSS and SmartPLS were used for data analysis.The results of data analysis shows:(1)plot reversal and plot authenticity only indirectly affects the advertising effect through the affective dimension of narrative transportation.(2)plot humor and plot familiarity will indirectly affect the advertising effect through the affective dimension and imagery dimension of narrative transportation.(3)plot integrity and plot connection will affect the advertising effect through the three dimensions of the narrative transportation,namely,the attentional,affective and imagery dimensions of the narrative transportation play an intermediary role.According to the research conclusion,this study puts forward some suggestions for the development of short video advertising from the content creation side and short video platform side.First of all,in the content creation of short videos,as for plot一 reversal,plot humor,plot integrity,plot authenticity,and plot connection,there are differences in the intermediary mechanisms that affect the effectiveness of short video advertising.Therefore,for the content creators of short videos,they can focus on the rational use of relevant elements of the story plot in their short videos to achieve their goals.Secondly,for the short video platform,the plot familiarity will negatively affect the audience’s narrative transportation level and thus affect the advertising effect.Therefore,for the platform side,we can consider optimizing its recommendation mechanism to control the promotion of short videos with similar content to the same users,and reasonably control the user’s familiarity with the story plot in the short videos on the recommendation algorithm level,so as to reduce the negative impact of the familiarity on the audience’s advertising effect.In terms of theoretical contributions,contributions are as follows:(1)in the field of short video advertising and narrative transportation,the main research object is the story.This study focuses on the story plot for research,and summarizes six factors related to the story plot in short video advertising through in-depth interviews.(2)in previous studies,narrative transportation has been used as a variable to test its mediation mechanism.However,this study,after examining its mediation mechanism as a variable,we also subdivided it into three dimensions for further research.(3)this study found that there are differences about intermediary mechanisms among different plot factors.(4)this study points out that the relationship between plot familiarity and narrative transportation is negative in the context of Douyin short videos,which is contrary to the previous research conclusions on story familiarity.