dr. FGR (Freya) De Keyzer

Biography

Can marketing help solve today's societal issues, or does it amplify them? It's a question I return to constantly and one that shapes everything from the research I design to the courses I teach. As an Assistant Professor of Media and Business at Erasmus University, I believe marketing has the power to create value far beyond economic gain, and I've built my work around understanding how.

My research sits at the intersection of digital persuasion and human psychology. I study how channels like personalized advertising, social media influencers, and AI agents shape the decisions consumers make, and more importantly, why. Using online experiments and eye-tracking, I try to get beneath the surface of behavior to the mechanisms driving it, with the goal of translating those insights into marketing strategies that produce meaningful, evidence-based change.

That mission feels most tangible in my work on CUES, a 20-partner Horizon Europe project I co-coordinate, focused on empowering consumers to adopt more sustainable food choices. The project works across three levers — culture, food value chains, and policy — and I've led both the cultural change interventions stream, using a back-casting methodology, and the Ethics & Data Management work package.

In the classroom, the same questions come alive differently. I coordinate the pre-master Media Studies program and teach marketing communication to over a hundred MA students each year, while supervising theses on topics spanning the full breadth of digital marketing. The interactions with students show each year that there is a clear tension between marketing and societal issues, and I love to discuss them with young and curious people.

I also try to contribute to the wider field, as a board member of NeFCA's Persuasive Communication Division and the European Advertising Academy, on the editorial review boards of the International Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Advertising, and most recently as chair of ICORIA 2025 in Rotterdam.

If you're thinking about how digital marketing can create value not just for brands, but for society, I'd love to connect.