IMCA Research seminar - Yesim Akmeraner-Kökat - Istanbul University

Revisiting Glocalization After Generative AI: How Marketers Imagine Local Consumers and Cultures Through AI

Abstract:

Generative AI is rapidly becoming part of international marketing practice. Global brands are increasingly using image and video generation tools to create and adapt campaigns across different cultural contexts, often with promises of greater speed, efficiency, and scalability. Yet these developments also raise broader questions about how local cultures and consumers are imagined when marketing content is increasingly produced with AI.

In this talk, I examine what happens to glocalization when the work of cultural mediation is increasingly shared with generative AI systems. Drawing on Consumer Culture Theory, sociomaterial approaches to marketing, and emerging research on AI-generated imagery, I explore a tension at the heart of AI-enabled glocalization: while successful glocalization depends on generating cultural syntheses and forging new connections between global and local cultural resources, generative AI models operate primarily through recurring patterns and prior associations and therefore struggle with unfamiliar connections.

This tension raises questions about how generative AI shapes the ways marketers imagine local consumers and local cultures, and how these imaginaries are mobilized in the production of regional marketing campaigns. While generative AI enables localization at an unprecedented scale, it may also privilege familiar, statistically common, and culturally legible representations over more emergent, messy, or historically specific cultural forms.

The talk presents a set of early ideas, conceptual provocations, and an emerging research agenda for studying AI-generated advertising and cultural mediation in international marketing contexts.

Bio:

Yeşim Akmeraner-Kökat is a researcher at the Faculty of Communication, Istanbul University. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences and an MA in Political Science and Public Administration from the Middle East Technical University (METU). She previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at IMCA, USI. Her research focuses on the digital transformation of creative advertising practice, examined through the lens of economic sociology. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marketing Management and the Journal of Cultural Economy, among others.