Multiple proximities and national identities: Turkish audiences’ perception of advertising adaptations

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines how commercials are adapted to appeal to a sense of national and cultural belonging within the overlapping contexts of global formats, national media, and local identities by comparing the American and the Turkish versions of television commercials arising from a Snickers global advertising campaign: “You are not you when you are hungry.” Using interviews with focus groups and an advertising practitioner, the article questions relevance of the concept of cultural proximity to understand the complexity of politics of identity construction through consumption of media products. I argue that the audiences reflexively negotiate localization strategies of the advertising agency to articulate three different strata of cultural proximity: national, global, and subcultural. The reception that demonstrates cultural hybridity, in which the antinomy between the global and the local/national resolves, is created through the multilayered structure and the multiplicity of cultural proximities in advertising adaptations.