Influence of audiovisual features of short video advertising on consumer engagement behaviors: Evidence from TikTok

With the phenomenal growth in TikTok’s user base, short video advertising has emerged as a crucial avenue for influencers to attract consumers and monetize traffic. Short videos stimulate users’ senses through audiovisual content, offering both entertainment and disseminating information. However, the underlying mechanisms influencing consumer engagement behaviors remain largely unknown. By analyzing short video advertisements from TikTok, we find four key audiovisual features—namely, colloquial expression, cadence, colorfulness, and visual prominence—that are significantly correlated with consumer engagement behaviors. For the first time, we integrate these audiovisual features with the multimodal theory and the elaboration likelihood model, enriching the research literature on consumer perception. Furthermore, we discover the moderating effect of product types and release time. Methodologically, our feature extraction methods, based on machine and deep learning contribute to social media research, offering insights into how influencers can leverage the audiovisual elements of short videos to captivate users.