Do Emotional and Storytelling Boost Engagement? A Simple Decision Model Using Advertisements for the Super Bowl on YouTube

Storytelling and emotional appeals are often recommended advertising strategies. However, it remains unclear about whether they reliably improve audience response during high-attention events like the Super Bowl. This study used a simple but transparent decision rule to pick the creative style with the higher expected engagement per view on advertisements. This study particularly seeks to ask whether emotional and storytelling advertisements on the Super Bowl generate higher engagement on YouTube than non-emotional or product-first advertisements. This study hypothesizes that emotional and storytelling advertisements would generate more per-view outcomes on likes-per-views and comments-per-views. Assembling a publicly available dataset of 219 Super Bowl commercials and merging it with basic YouTube metadata (views, likes, and comments) with independent creative labels, this study normalized outcomes by views to compare advertisements. Compared group means were calculated by using Welch’s unequal-variance t-test. Across both outcomes, differences between emotional vs. non-emotional and storytelling vs. product-first advertisements turned out to be small and not statistically significant (all p>0.05). Confidence intervals overlapped. Therefore, hypothesis in this study was not supported. In a highly optimized setting, high-level creative labels alone did not much increase observable social engagement.