hubecall | Tag : brand communication

New Directions in Influencer Research

Journal of Advertising Research (TANDF) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:55:16 GMT

Veronica L. Thomas, Old Dominion University

Kendra Fowler, Youngstown State University

Influencer marketing has evolved from a niche social media tactic into a core component of contemporary brand communication strategies. During this time, research on influencer marketing has proliferated, helping to define and broaden our conceptualization of influencers, while providing key insights into how influencer marketing functions, and situating influencer marketing more broadly within society.

At the same time, the influencer marketing landscape is undergoing rapid transformation. Advances in generative AI, the emergence of synthetic and virtual influencers, evolving platform governance structures, and the increasing professionalization of creators raise important questions about whether dominant assumptions, frameworks, and empirical regularities continue to hold. Many widely cited findings were developed under technological, cultural, and platform conditions that are now shifting in fundamental ways.

As a result, the field faces an inflection point. While continued refinement of established effects remains valuable, there is a growing need for research that moves beyond incremental extensions and instead rethinks how influence operates, who influencers are, and how value is created and contested in contemporary influencer ecosystems. This includes revisiting core constructs, interrogating emerging managerial challenges, and introducing new theoretical lenses capable of capturing these changes.

In this special issue, we call on researchers to move beyond continued incremental contributions and instead to focus on broader questions and truly novel insights. Such insights may be gleaned by examining influencer marketing through a new theoretical lens, considering how technological, societal, or cultural shifts have altered the influencer landscape, or exploring emerging managerial challenges and strategic implications that will alter how advertisers will utilize influencer marketing in the future.

We encourage authors to build on prior work while also critically revisiting core assumptions in the literature. At the same time, we caution against submissions that primarily replicate well-established findings without offering meaningful theoretical extension or new boundary conditions.

The Journal of Advertising Research invites proposals for this special issue aimed at advancing theoretically grounded, methodologically rigorous, and managerially relevant insights into how influencers shape advertising and marketplace dynamics.

Potential topics

How are deepfakes and synthetic media altering how consumers process and engage with influencer marketing?
How are influencers incorporating AI tools into content creation, audience management, and monetization, and how do these practices reshape influence?
How do influencer collectives, creator economies, and platform governance structures reshape influence and value creation?
What are the power dynamics that occur across influencer–brand–platform relationships?
How has the influencer ecosystem changed, or how does it need to change, to address increased opportunities for influence beyond social media platforms or the use of AI tools to facilitate content creation?
How is influence extending beyond traditional social media into commerce, entertainment, education, and hybrid digital physical spaces?
How do influencers function as brands, entrepreneurs, and marketing organizations rather than merely as endorsers?
What competitive threats do influencers face from other creators, platforms, AI generated content, or brand owned media?
How do influencers adapt, reposition, or professionalize as their audiences, technologies, and revenue models evolve?
How can influencers themselves be protected from exploitation, burnout, harassment, or reputational harm?
How should firms design influencer strategies across different stages of the customer journey and across multiple platforms?
How does influencer marketing effectiveness vary across cultural, geographic, and market contexts?
What strategic trade-offs do firms face between reach, authenticity, control, and risk in influencer partnerships?
How should brands evaluate influencer fit, performance, and spillovers in increasingly algorithmic environments?
How do misinformation, manipulated content, and brand safety risks emerge and spread within influencer ecosystems?
How can influence, engagement, and persuasion be more accurately measured in dynamic, algorithmically curated environments?
How can field experiments and platform-based data be leveraged to enhance external validity?
How can researchers capture spillover effects, halo effects, and cross-platform influence in influencer campaigns?
What new metrics or analytical approaches are needed to study influence at scale and over time?
How should advertisers select influencers to fit their specific strategic needs?
Are existing influencer typologies still relevant, or are new classification frameworks needed?
Where do existing theories of persuasion, social influence, and communication fall short in explaining consumer–influencer relationships today?
How should foundational theories be extended or revised to account for AI-mediated and platform-driven influence?

Timeline

July 1, 2026: Submission window opens
October 12, 2026: Manuscript deadline

Advertising Narratives: Transportation, Imagination, and Brand Storytelling

International Journal of Advertising (TANDF) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:55:16 GMT

Eunjin (Anna) Kim, University of Southern California

Robert Kozinets, University of Southern California

With AI and other tools supercharging nonspecialists' abilities to create and communicate narratives, we are in the midst of an unprecedented growth in advertising storytelling—perhaps with a corresponding rise in the need to understand the human, the cultural, and the narrative. Emotional brandings and advertising storytelling function as a powerful cultural resource in their own right. Influencers construct and circulate brand-related stories by weaving them into personal experiences, ensuring that stories seeded in campaigns live on through retellings, remixes, and conversations. These retellings are also increasingly shaped by algorithmic tools such as AI-generated reviews, comments, or testimonials that circulate alongside human imaginaries and narratives.

In this environment, advertising storytelling can be understood as an adaptive process produced and recombined across humans, AI systems, and media channels. Generative AI scripts dialogue, personalizes arcs, and generates countless variations, while algorithms determine which story fragments audiences encounter. Campaigns function less as bounded arcs and more as adaptive or transmedia flows, raising questions about authorship, coherence, authenticity, and credibility in advertising storytelling. Yet, as AI-driven narratives proliferate, we must not lose sight of the human craft of advertising storytelling built on relationships.

Experimental research shows that narrative ads enhance attention, recall, credibility, and persuasion through empathetic processing, transportation, mental simulation, and identification. Yet these mechanisms, while well established, are increasingly tested in environments where narrative forms are short, fragmented, and fleeting.

Beyond these psychological mechanisms, a deeper cultural understanding of brand meaning can be found through the allegorical power of brand stories, the embrace of brand paradox, and the intertwining of cultural imagination, archetypes, and imaginaries. With important exceptions, critical approaches and cultural methods like ethnography and netnography are under-utilized. We still know relatively little about what makes an advertising story compelling whether structure, character, or brand integration. We lack sufficient understanding about how algorithmic and human-authored narratives interact to create or fracture meaning for consumers, or how new media formats such as podcasts function.

Our understanding is still growing about storytelling that transpires in digital platforms that demand coherence and immersion in seconds. TikTok skits, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts highlight storytelling's entertainment value, but entertainment alone does not ensure persuasion. Audiences might remember the attention-grabbing elements of an advertising story but not the product or brand, a challenge known as the 'vampire effect'. While entertainment is increasingly fundamental for sustaining attention, its relationship to persuasion and meaning-making remains undertheorized. The forms, structures, and impacts of influencer storytelling around the globe are still poorly understood. Regardless of technology, the deep-seated cultural template, myths and human relationships continue to be powerful, and under-explored, aspects of the human advertising experience.

This Special Issue invites scholarship that explores and perhaps redefines storytelling in advertising. We seek contributions that chart new ground as well as those that revisit foundational historical and narrative theories in light of contemporary cultural and technological contexts. We welcome conceptual and empirical work across advertising and marketing, consumer culture theory, history, sociology, anthropology, media psychology, communication and health communication, and cultural/media studies. Methods may include controlled or field experiments, ethnography and netnography, archival and historical analysis, semiotic and discourse analysis, neuroscientific measures, and computational approaches from computer science, HCI, and information science. All submissions must place advertising or brand storytelling at the center of inquiry.

Potential topics

(Re-)Conceptualizing what advertising storytelling is 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 current 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 when and why narrative advertising is more, or less, effective than non-narrative approaches
Investigating questions about authorship, coherence, authenticity, and credibility in advertising storytelling when campaigns function as adaptive or transmedia flows
Examining how algorithmic and human-authored narratives interact to create or fracture meanings for consumers
Analyses of brand storytelling strategies, where advertising narratives are designed to act 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 the forms, structures, and/or impacts of influencer storytelling around the globe
Cross-device coherence in narrative advertising: how audiences integrate story arcs across TV, mobile, and digital formats
Algorithmic sequencing and recombination of story fragments, and implications for narrative coherence and persuasion in advertising
Brand integration challenges in short-form storytelling advertising and risks of the 'vampire effect'
Revisiting persuasion mechanisms (empathetic processing, transportation, mental simulation, and identification) in contemporary environments
Tensions between advertising messages and social and political issues (e.g., environmentalism, self-esteem, social justice)
Exploring the dialectical relationship between brand storytelling and consumer resistance, skepticism, or counter-narratives (e.g., 'culture jamming')
Story fatigue and manipulation: As every campaign now 'tells a story,' are consumers experiencing overexposure, leading to cynicism or narrative distrust?
Dark narratives: How should advertising research address the risks of narratives that normalize harmful stereotypes, dramatize false conflicts, or glamorize risky behaviors?
Ethics of AI-augmented storytelling: how does AI-generated or deepfake narratives alter the ethics of persuasion?
Too-good stories vs. brand reality: When narratives overpromise, should narrative effectiveness also be judged on truthfulness and accountability?
How storytelling in advertising creates context for identities, authenticity, and the quest for the 'real'?

Timeline

November 11, 2026: Manuscript submission deadline
November 11, 2026: Submissions window