The Moderating Role of User Emotional Projection in the Effectiveness of AI Short-Video Marketing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63313/SSH.9105Keywords:
AI Short Videos, User Emotional Projection, Marketing Effectiveness, Parasocial Interaction, Content CharacteristicsAbstract
With the advancement of generative artificial intelligence technology, AI short videos have assumed an increasingly important role in brand marketing. Nevertheless, users exhibit markedly different marketing responses to identical AI short videos, a variation largely moderated by their emotional projection. Drawing upon emotional communication theory and media psychological projection theory, this study employs literature integration and theoretical construction to systematically review empirical studies published between 2020 and 2026 on platforms such as Douyin, Bilibili, and YouTube. It focuses on the mechanism through which AI content characteristics—specifically the degree of anthropomorphism and the lifelikeness of narrative scenarios—influence users’ purchase intention, and further examines the moderating effect of user emotional projection within this process. The findings indicate that AI content characteristics can significantly enhance purchase intention by stimulating users’ emotional projection and parasocial interaction; however, this effect is substantially moderated by the individual’s level of emotional projection. High-emotional-projection users are more inclined to form trust-based attachment relationships, thereby strengthening marketing effectiveness, whereas low-emotional-projection users tend to activate authenticity-scrutiny mechanisms, which attenuates the persuasive impact. Moreover, the influence of emotional projection on marketing effectiveness exhibits a nonlinear threshold effect: the positive effects of content characteristics are fully realized only when emotional projection reaches a certain level. This study constructs an integrated analytical framework of “AI content characteristics → emotional projection → parasocial interaction → trust formation → purchase intention,” revealing the pivotal moderating role of users’ psychological mechanisms in AI short-video marketing and providing theoretical grounding for e-commerce content optimization in the context of intelligent communication.
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