The ‘time effect’ of tourism short videos: how to match the advertising format and background music

Destinations increasingly use time cues in short video advertising, but the effect is not ideal. Leveraging the strengths of different advertising formats becomes a pressing issue. This paper investigates how matching advertising formats and background music in tourism short video advertisements affects tourists' travel inspiration based on the spreading-activation theory. The theoretical model is verified by analysing TikTok's real data and two contextual experiments. Our findings indicate that nostalgia advertising is better paired with sedate background music, than forestalgia advertising is with energetic music. Mental time travel mediates this process, with psycho-semantic consistency as an implicit mechanism for effective message delivery in nostalgia and forestalgia advertising. Theoretically, this paper highlights temporal differentiation in tourism advertising, enriching nostalgia advertising and advancing forestalgia research. Practically, it provides an enhanced solution for destination short video marketing from both audio and visual dimensions.