I am originally from Turkey (also formally known as Turkiye). After studying Bsc Management Engineering at Istanbul Technical University, and MA Management Information Systems at Bogazici University, I started my professional life working in different local companies (mostly advertising agencies) in Turkey. In 2010, I joined Facebook as Online Sales Operations analyst in their European HQ in Dublin. This was the role which provided me great depth of understanding on the operational work behind the scenes at Facebook, a young pre-IPO startup at the time. During my time at Facebook Dublin, I worked in sales and product marketing organizations. My primary focus was to support Facebook’s ‘direct response’ advertisers in the region and launch/grow its ‘direct response’ solutions, which were relatively new at the time, such as Facebook’s Conversion Pixel, Conversion Optimization, Website Custom Audiences, App Ads, and Dynamic Ads.

After spending 6+ years in Dublin, I moved to global HQ in California, and joined Instagram business team as product marketing manager to lead the market insights and Go-to-market efforts for various Instagram business offerings such as Platform API, ads optimization, and direct response solutions. I spent most of my time at Instagram supporting product strategy and leading the global public launch of Instagram Platform API into Facebook’s Graph API (more details).

While I enjoyed my time at Instagram business team, I was looking for a new opportunity within Facebook to lead product marketing efforts for a truly 0-1 product. I did not wait for too long, and the opportunity knocked my door. I joined Facebook’s very first shopper marketing efforts, and became the first product marketing manager for Collaborative Ads solution (more details). Collaborative Ads was a world class experience of building an innovative solution for Facebook. I led the public launch and global growth of the solution. Even though I had experience with Retail and CPG advertisers in the past, during my time in Collaborative Ads, I went much deeper with my understanding of shopper marketing, these stakeholders’ relationship and co-dependency, and opportunities to grow these businesses together.

I spent the last 5 years of my time at Meta on advertising solutions for particularly retailers, starting with Collaborative Ads. Last few years, I led a team focusing on broader range of solutions for retailers such as monetization features, managed partner ads (solution designed to support media efforts of marketplaces and retailers), local fatures and lately, omnichannel capabilities.

During my 12+ years at Facebook/Meta, I had the privilege to work with some of the smartest people I have ever met, and had the chance to learn advertising ecosystem through Meta’s lens with thousands of advertisers globally, from EMEA to North America, from South East Asia to India and China. I co-led Meta’s product strategy for retailers, and helped make some of the key decisions at senior levels. After all, I decided to quit Meta in May 2023, and take a break from corporate life for a while.