The Color of Engagement: How Visual Hue, Hedonic Cues, and Audio Arousal Shape Fan Attention in Short-Form Sports Videos

We analyze 100 fan-generated TikTok videos from the 2025 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament to examine how visual hue, branding, hedonic cues, and audio arousal relate to engagement. Using computer vision and audio signal processing, we test theory-driven hypotheses within a model framework. Results show directional evidence for a U-shaped association between hue and engagement; this pattern appears stronger when hedonic cues are present and weaker under high audio arousal, consistent with accounts of affective amplification and multimodal overload. Given the small sample and measurement limits, we treat non-significant effects as exploratory. We contribute an ecologically grounded approach for studying multimodal attention in short-form sports media and offer practical guidance: design for sensory balance (color intensity with moderated audio) rather than saturation. Future work should scale data, incorporate saliency-weighted and temporal visual features, and examine algorithmic mediation.