| PhD in Digital Marketing & Applied AI | University of Amsterdam |
University of Amsterdam · Amsterdam Business School · 2026
PhD in Digital Marketing & Applied AI
Voices in Action: AI-Powered Insights from Corporate Messaging During Societal Crises
The dissertation examined how organizations communicate during high-stakes societal moments—and how those messages shape public engagement and action. It combined large-scale computational analysis with theory-driven human validation and controlled experiments.
The research in one minute
Three contexts. One question: whose voice and message design shape what happens next?
CEO voice or brand voice?
During the Russia–Ukraine war, CEO and brand accounts behaved as different communication tools. CEO voices generated stronger engagement, while effects on action depended on framing and psychological distance.
When should brands stand firm?
Public response depended not only on whether brand and citizen positions aligned, but on the direction of that alignment. Pro-DEI alignment was rewarded; anti-DEI alignment could be punished.
Can a tiny visual cue change engagement?
When brands communicated about socially distant causes, engagement fell. Symbolic emojis that expanded meaning could narrow that gap; repetitive icons did not produce the same effect.
Methodological contribution
AI scaled the measurement. Humans anchored the meaning.
Across the empirical chapters, computational methods helped identify and classify more than 250,000 social-media posts against theory-driven rubrics. The categorical decisions were not treated as model truth: the coding logic was developed from theory and validated with human raters.
Field evidence was then triangulated with controlled experiments. This combination of computational scale, human-validated measurement, and experimental replication is the methodological signature that connects the dissertation to my current applied-AI work.
Academic validation
How the committee described the contribution.
“I really like the systematic analysis of social media data because it's novel but also that it's combined with your experimental studies to address mechanisms.”
“It stands for everything that the business school is standing for. It's very innovative. You took some risk using, at that time, very modern tools like large language models.”
Doctoral examination
Defense committee
Selected images
Public defense at the Agnietenkapel, Amsterdam.
From dissertation to current work
The PhD is a foundation for what comes next.
The same principles now extend into multimodal digital behavior, human–AI systems, auditable LLM workflows, decision intelligence, and the AI Empowerment Observatory.
About the Dutch public PhD defense format
Dutch doctoral defenses are formal public academic examinations. At the University of Amsterdam, the candidate presents the work publicly and is questioned by the doctoral committee during a timed formal opposition. My defense took place at the historic Agnietenkapel in Amsterdam.