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