Archives: Speakers

Faris began his career as a strategy consultant for digital businesses during the first dot com explosion. He moved into the agency world, eventually joining Naked Communications as their 20th employee. Faris worked for Naked in London, Sydney and New York, during their heyday, as a communication strategist and later as global head of digital.

Faris went on to be EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson NYC, tasked with ushering in their digital transformation, which led to them wining their first ever Cyber Lion at Cannes. Subsequently he was appointed Chief Innovation Officer of MDC Partners, a network of best in breed agencies, including CPB, Anomaly, 72 & Sunny and kbs+.

Deployed within kbs+, he established a social team and developed the social products and services, helped start the content team, and co-founded creative technology boutique Spies&Assassins.

Faris was a founding member of the IPA Social Committee, is on the global advisory board of Social Media Week, and has judged numerous award shows, including the social category for the Effies. He helped the London International Awards to create and define the NEW category to reflect and highlight innovation in the industry. He has been blogging and involved in the ongoing discussions around social in the industry for almost a decade.

He has written about social media and marketing for Campaign, Fast Company, Forbes, Contagious, Canvas8 and Age of Conversation books. He has spoken on social, digital and innovative marketing all over the world and his thesis on the future of brands won the inaugural IPA President’s Prize.

Rosie began her career working with hip hop moguls Jay-Z and Steve Stoute at their entertainment branding company, developing non-traditional ways for brand like Altoids, Target, Wrigley and Samsung to connect with their fans. She joined Cake Group’s newly founded New York office in 2009 where she launched Motorola’s global social media presence and helped brands like Havaianas, Sears and Oppenheimer navigate the world of social and digital media.

In early 2011, Rosie joined Saatchi & Saatchi’s New York office to lead social and emerging media, advising brands including P&G’s Pampers & Olay and General Mills’ Cheerios amongst others. She helped the agency to develop a point of view on social, guiding their own social media presence as well as their internal structure and setup for future projects.

Before co-founding Genius Steals with Faris, Rosie was most recently at 360i, an award-winning digital marketing agency, named by Fast Company as one of the world’s most innovative companies. There she and her team helped brands like Bravo, Dentyne, NBCU and Oreo navigate the world of social and emerging media from creative ideation through to activation.

This included being the lead strategist on the Cannes Grand Prix and Facebook Best in Show winning Oreo Daily Twist campaign, where she developed the strategy and interagency process necessary to deliver fresh creative content every day for 100 days and to ‘win the superbowl’ with the blackout tweet that birthed Real Time Marketing

Deniz is an internationally recognized leader in driving digital transformations and bringing new digital banking experiences to audiences globally.

At Standard Chartered, he oversees a great number of initiatives, ranging from global digital insights & strategies, client journeys, and optimizations, digital wealth initiatives to collaborations with leading tech firms and emerging start-ups. His aim is to transform the Bank into a digital business and to create fresh and exciting digital experiences. Deniz believes that by integrating banking to client’s lives seamlessly, the Bank adds the human touch that compliments people’s active and fast-paced lifestyles.

Prior to joining Standard Chartered, Deniz served as the Senior Vice President at BBVA Group’s Garanti Bank, Turkey’s most valuable company by market capitalization. His role included the management and oversight of mobile and online banking channels, ATM and voice technologies including call center, along with user experience and service design, digital marketing and communications, partnering, corporately owned websites, and social media channels.

Bora Uludüz is the Director of Digital Banking at Garanti Bank. Previously, he was an Associate Partner at McKinsey&Company, the global management consultancy firm.

Uludüz holds an MBA degree from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University.

After graduating from the Faculty of Engineering, University of Istanbul, she completed her master studies at Finance Department of the Business Administration Faculty of the same university. In 2011, she stepped into the finance sector and worked at the economic research departments of brokerage houses. After joining Bloomberg HT TV station in June 2013 as the Research Specialist, she is now host of various shows such as Risk Management, Sector Report and Forex World.

Sefer Yüksel graduated from the Department of Finance, Faculty of Economics of Istanbul University. He started his career at “Para” Magazine in 1999. After studying in London from 2000 to 2003, Yüksel started working for “Para” Magazine again in 2004. Yüksel who worked at Akşam daily newspaper from December 2005 to February 2008 and then worked at Referans daily newspaper until October 2008. In October 2008, Yüksel, who joined Haberturk daily newspaper which was at the stage of foundation back then, has been working as an stock exchange-finance editor since the start of this newspaper. Yüksel also prepares and is the co-host of a TV show entitled Financial Technology that is aired live for 1 day a week at BloombergHT station, along with Güzem Yılmaz.

Erdem is product developer who is focused on mobile technologies. He is passionate about mobile apps and games with more than 8 years experience in mobile app development.

In 2014, he founded APPS and developed dozens of different mobile application projects. His team’s latest project, “A Word Game” became the most popular mobile game of the 2017 in Turkey and chosen as one of the best games of the year by Google.

He has been organizing events as well as speaking and mentoring on mobile tech related topics since 2010. He’s also interested in productivity and loves learning new things everyday.

Mehmet Yıldırım graduated from Istanbul University International Affairs faculty and during his university education he took on local and international roles at AISEC, largest student organization in the world. After living in Cairo and Rotterdam for almost 2 years he returned to Turkey and worked at Uber Advertising Agency for 5 years as Account Director. At the beginning of 2016 he started working at Yandex Turkey as Marketing Manager. He was first responsible for the marketing of search services, but then moved on to the communication of map services. Now, he is the Marketing and Communications Manager of the most popular navigation app of Turkey, Yandex Navigation, and responsible for user acquisition, product marketing and public relations.

Erdem co-founded Coretech, which is one of the first independent software development companies in Turkey 23 years ago. Coretech developed custom software for large multi-national companies such as Unilever, P&G, Tefal, and Pfizer in more than 20 countries where Erdem was managing international projects. At Coretech, Erdem started his first internet project in 1999 founding Kokteyl which was focused only on B2C internet projects. Kokteyl’s main success was Mackolik.com, the most popular online sports brand in Turkey for more than 15 years. Erdem sold Mackolik to Perform Group at an $80+m valuation, marking one of the largest acquisitions in the Turkish internet sector.

Erdem is still managing a portfolio of key projects at Kokteyl and other companies that he founded, providing seed investment or mentorship. Masomo is one of his new mobile gaming companies with a successful game called Online Head Ball with more than 50 million players worldwide. He also has a new tech company called Admost Mediation which helps app and game developers to maximize their advertising revenues. Erdem has a significant experience in adtech business for more than 15 years where he is currently managing over 10 billion monthly impressions at Admost.

Having graduated from Kayseri Science High School, Burak completed his bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Galatasaray University. Publishing his own comics fanzin in the college years, he discovered his passion for copywriting and started his journey in communication sector back in 2005.

In first years of his career, he worked for Youth Republic and Alametifarika both of which were milestones shaping his next moves. In 2009, he started working in digital media department of SMG Turkey, followed by leadership of content and social media strategies for several brands in United People from the day it was established. In 2013, he was back in Starcom for leading the online & offline media channel integration, managed several brands like Samsung Turkey and Mondelez International. He and his team won more than 35 national/international awards such as The Smarties, Mixx Awards, Kristal Elma, Felis and Social Media Awards Turkey.

Deciding to be a part of startup ecosystem, Burak has been performing in App Samurai, a mobile ad technology company,  as Business Development Director, since 2017’s last quarter.