Exploring Feed-Based Advertising and AI in Product Management with adidas's Senior Product Manager, Onur Polat

Get ready for a ride as senior product manager at adidas, Onur Polat, steps into the spotlight. His journey from launching a jobs portal in Albania to charting the intricacies of corporations and scale-ups like Criteo and Channable is nothing short of inspiring. We'll be picking his brain about the significance of feed-based advertising in product management, and we promise, his insights are a treasure trove of knowledge you won't want to miss.

We'll be demystifying the 'black box' concept as we explore how the quality of output is a direct reflection of what goes in. We'll also confront the challenging decision between buying and building when it comes to product feeds. Onur's  experiences underscore the importance of homegrown capabilities to generate raw feeds. And there's more! We'll be taking a closer look at Google's Product Studio and its potential to provide solutions to product feeds.

But that's not all. We'll be dwelling on the impact of AI tools on companies, with Onur sharing his experiences with the Bing image generator. You'll hear his take on why larger enterprises should approach AI with caution. Our journey with Onur extends to his role in adidas's Paid Traffic Product team, the distinction between the work of product and marketing teams, and the transformative role of CMOs in today's technology-driven business landscape. So, stay tuned. This is one episode that will leave you brimming with new insights and perspectives.

Visit adidas.com for more information about the brand. 

Transcript

Mike Ryan: 0:09

Welcome to Growing Ecommerce. I'm your host, mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce, also known as SMEC. Today I'm joined by Oenor Polat, a senior product manager at Adidas and sometimes I call that Adidas, since I'm here in the German-speaking market and he's responsible for Adidas's global ad tech and paid traffic product efforts. We discuss his career from bootstrapping a jobs portal in Albania to working in corporate environments like Croteo and scale-ups like Channable. From there, we talk about everything from feed-based advertising to product management and horizontal initiatives to the interplay of CMO, cto and CFO. It's an expansive conversation with someone who has a lot to teach. All right, let's get into it. So thanks so much for joining us today.

Onur Polat: 1:03

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks, Mike.

Mike Ryan: 1:06

Absolutely. Why don't you get started with a quick introduction? What are your skills? What themes interest you?

Onur Polat: 1:14

Yeah, my skills. I think I would say my biggest skill is putting size into practice, and I guess that's both the reason why I became an engineer in the first place and that's also why I really love doing it. A bit about myself I was raised in Turkey. I went to a special high school which was designed to raise scientists, but at some point in time it came to me that we have a lot of science but we don't really always leverage all the science in practice, and that's when I started to lose my interest in pursuing that and that's when I turned to engineering, because I really wanted to focus on building things for the people, and that pretty much defined my career.

Onur Polat: 2:22

And talking about the careers, I think I have a somewhat awkward career trajectory. Most people start their careers in an enterprise setting or in a company setting and then at some point in time they get bored and they start their businesses. They attempt to go for a startup. We did the opposite with my brother the year I started the university. We also started our own startup. That startup was mostly around the internet in general. One of the biggest highlights from that experience is we built a creation of news sources online news resources for Turkey. I did a lot of search engine optimization at the time and at some point in time it hit half a million visitors per day, so that was amazing. That's when I also started to focus on the monetization side of the things and more and more I got lured into this digitalizing space both the organic side of the things. But then, as we started to monetize those properties, I got also experience around the tech space.

Onur Polat: 3:55

Once we had some cash to put aside, we wanted to try something else and we wanted it to be at a national level. But Turkey is a very big country to attempt to do something at the national level. Then we picked Albania, a relatively smaller country, and there we built a job portal. Slash resume database Before LinkedIn was really a thing. My brother still manages it. I think it's still the biggest job portal in the country. But the thing is it didn't really scale up as much as I wanted it to grow and after like 15 years I turned into a corporate scale up career, if you will.

Onur Polat: 4:47

So in the past nine years I have worked at advertising platforms like Curitio. I was a contractor for Facebook for the time. Then I got more and more into the product side of the things. I managed an internal product for the creative agency for SEAT, which was around dynamic, creative optimization, and then my path took me to the Netherlands. I moved to the Netherlands with Chernobyl as a platform partnerships manager. I would say that was really a turning point in my career. But yeah, we can talk about it later. And now I'm at Adidas and as a global sports company. We believe that through support we have the power to change lives, and I didn't love this purpose. I have started doing more sports recently and I do observe it firsthand, all the change that it brings to my life, but this doesn't mean I didn't really do sports. I was always a diehard walker. Maybe an interesting fact I walked the marathon of Athens like 15 years ago, so that's basically 42 kilometers, 195 meters. I walked it in 6,058 minutes.

Mike Ryan: 6:25

That's awesome, I mean. I think walking is good for the mind as well as the body. I'm a big fan of walking as well.

Onur Polat: 6:32

Yeah, exactly, that's maybe the child of the skin from my side. Yeah.

Mike Ryan: 6:36

Yeah, definitely yeah, and I like this kind of framing that you like you know describing kind of taking science and putting into practice and then having this career of building things coming into the monetization space. Croteo, as you mentioned Channibal, maybe you could tell us a bit more about your time at Channibal. You know what kind of work were you doing there? You said that was a turning point in your career. How did you mean that? What did you learn there? What happened?

Onur Polat: 7:10

Yeah, so for the people who don't know about Chernobyl, it's a feed management platform based in Utrecht, netherlands. I think they are now almost 10 years old and I think they are at like 250 employee count. When I started working there three and a half years ago, I might have been employee number 100. So they were still a bit smaller, but still a scale up, and I was brought in as a platform partnerships manager, reporting directly into the CEO. Like I said, it was about time. They were truly becoming a strong scale up. They had a great foundation with their products and they had a great client base.

Onur Polat: 8:05

What was missing was the key partnerships with the platforms for which they were actually creating the feeds. Right, because you can generate feeds for Google Merchant Center, for Facebook, for Snapchat or any platform that offers some kind of dynamic product ads. So there was this gap across all functions. I would say there was a gap for the product partnerships. They were usually trying to make sense of all the online documentation, but they didn't have a one-on-one interaction with the engineers of these platforms. Similarly, there was a gap for the product marketing. Even though they were actually enabling these platforms, they weren't really doing much of a co-marketing activity person. So that was another gap. And lastly, it was also the official recognition right, like becoming official partners to these platforms was an important goal and in my role I had a chance to work on all these.

Onur Polat: 9:26

Some highlights include getting the Facebook marketing partner badge for Chernobyl. We were the first commerce partner for Meta in the Netherlands. So quite a few highlights like that with Microsoft, with Google, and such A big shout out to the CEO, rob Van Unen. He's the best boss I have ever had outside my family I have to because my mom might listen to this and yeah, it was an amazing journey. It really helped me put all my previous skills right, everything I brought from entrepreneurship, but also all the background I had with all those advertising platforms. It was really a great melting pot for me where I could really transfer and combine all these experience, all these learnings, and put it into great use. So in that sense, I'm really grateful that I had that experience.

Mike Ryan: 10:39

Yeah, chernobyl is a company. They've been around for quite a while, as you mentioned, and I just want to follow up on this topic about feeds a bit, because I think it is such an interesting area in e-commerce, in advertising. It's at the intersection of these different spaces where your product feed is actually kind of a data product. It's really a foundation upon which other things are going to be built, and I think that becomes increasingly important these days because there's these criticisms about Google ads coming a bit more black box or quite black box and other channels. All will follow suit. Meta has their Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, tiktok, even, I think, snap, all going in these direction of these very highly automated campaigns. So I think that data that you're then feeding into the platform is as important or more than ever. I mean, maybe you could tell us a bit about product feeds. Also, what kind of decisions go into that regarding builder-by decisions? How do the needs of, say, an enterprise differ from needs of others? Tell us about the significance of feeds a bit.

Onur Polat: 12:01

I think it's a great question and I think first take not a step back, but a step to the side, because you mentioned an interesting concept of the black box. So more and more platforms are moving in this direction and AI is at the hype. The thing is, all these platforms invest heavily in building these black boxes to serve their end clients and to make their own clients successful, and I think they're generally doing a great job. And I don't think we are now going to go into whether this black box approach is healthy or not. I'll probably leave it to another discussion. But let's just think about what happens when you have a black box.

Onur Polat: 12:59

So some data or some input goes into a black box and then some output comes out. The thing is, regardless of what happens in a black box, the quality of the output is a function of your input. It doesn't matter, I mean, how cool Google's AI is, how well Facebook optimizes, it all starts with your input. Speaking in engineering terms, there's a concept called garbage in, garbage out. If you don't feed high quality input to any black box or any platform, what you will get cannot meet your expectations. So in that sense and that's the reason why a product feed is called a feed, I mean you actually feed it into a machine learning algorithm. So in that sense, I feel that sometimes the importance of product feeds is a bit underestimated.

Onur Polat: 14:08

I think most people try to focus on what happens within the black box or all those fancy settings you have on all these interfaces, and they tend to forget the importance of that very basic input you feed into the platforms. So in that sense, moving to the second half of your questions around the buy or build decision will do, I would say, companies, pretty much regardless of their size I mean, maybe I'll exclude very small businesses with relatively stable count of articles I would say most enterprises should build the capabilities to generate their source feeds or the raw input themselves, and then, when it comes to passing these raw feeds to multiple channels, for which you would need customizing, I would again at a high level, I would encourage enterprises or companies of all sizes to really look into the commercial offerings which comes from platforms like Chernobyl Data, feed Watch I don't know, I hear I think RY Hunter they do things Intelligent Reach there are a couple of platforms. So there are some really cool tools which help you modify and customize your feeds. So by all means, use them to your advantage. There's no point in reinventing the wheel.

Onur Polat: 15:59

These platforms do a great job to process your raw feed and then to customize it to the channels, but, in my opinion, the biggest part of the magic happens with your source feed, your source input, and this, in my view, should be handled in-house. And why is that? The thing is, your team is the only team who can make sense of, or an internal team is the only team, only player, who can make sense of what matters for your business when it comes to product feeds, so that whatever data, whatever information you need to leverage is actually included in the feeds. If you use a standard commercial package which also claims oh OK, you can click a product feed with three clicks, you will most probably end up with a very generic feed which actually cannot give you the edge. It's as simple as that.

Onur Polat: 17:09

And it's 2023, right, and I've been around for a long time when it comes to internet and digital advertising. For a considerable amount of time, having a strong digital presence was enough to give companies an edge, right, because other companies were not able to catch up, they were not able to digitalize their efforts, et cetera, et cetera. That trend has long gone. Now pretty much everyone is online, everybody is advertising online, and in order to get those 5%, 10%, 8% incrementality, you really need to focus on your internal product data and how you can incorporate it in a meaningful way to make the most out of all those black boxes, all those advertising platforms to the maximum. So that's how I would answer.

Mike Ryan: 18:12

Yeah, so it makes sense, and I mean, I have to ask you that question because I know you're a builder and so you're talking about making sure that this raw source is coming from you and is customized and then leaving the feed syndication and customization to a service provider. I'm wondering because now we're headed in a really interesting direction with some of this new technology. As you mentioned, it's 2023 now and we have increasingly Google and I'm sure soon to follow others, but in the first place, I would say Google is pretty advanced here. They're working on trying to offer tools to supplement your feed, but also workarounds to the feed altogether. So some of these products include we could look at things that are on the supplementation side, like Product Studio.

Mike Ryan: 19:12

This is I don't think it's even launched yet. It was announced at Google Marketing Live a couple months back and that's really to help your product images. It uses AI to enhance your images. Like you can swap out backgrounds Instead of using the stock image, you can just and having to do that in Photoshop or some other tool right there in the Merchant Center, you can have generative AI, create whatever background you want. And then probably the biggest, most ambitious, and I think this is something they've wanted to do for years, but with Merchant Center next, they're looking at bypassing the feed altogether, where you can offer a URL, for example, ai will read the page and will just produce its own, like you don't need the feed at all. I mean, given what you said about the need to have competitive advantage via your feed, the importance of the input quality into a black box yeah, the increasing competitiveness, the importance of expressing what you know about your business, all these things that you said, like, how do you feel about these AI tools in that context?

Onur Polat: 20:25

Yeah, AI is the hype, right? I think we had no option to, we had no choice but to talk about it. So I think some of these developments are really interesting, especially for smaller businesses. On a lower budget, right, I mean, if you don't have a big budget to produce, especially a real asset, I think options like generating images with AI could be attractive. Now, the thing is and don't take me wrong I'm like I said, I really enjoy putting science into practice, right? I mean, that's, I would say, but summarizes my entire career. So I was playing with AI. Let's take a bit of a side tour.

Onur Polat: 21:26

I was playing with AI, so I went into the Bing image generator, I think they use some version of Dalai, and I said, okay, I'll keep the city simple, because I mean I really don't have the time to go into all those documentation and I don't know from engineering. I just want to introduce myself in an easy way and, being the simple-minded person I am, what I put on the generators input box was postcard for 2024. And the images I got out none of them had 2024 anywhere on the image. And that was, to be honest, very surprising to me Because and you would notice, I mean I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, I think, even though there are a lot of people who are posting similar content, I think it's still an important source of truth, especially given competition looks like Twitter and I see all these really not necessarily thought leaders, but I see all these people who hold great positions in great companies. They keep talking about the AI and I was very surprised to see that such a simple prompt couldn't produce anything interesting, like I was just trying to make a joke in one of our meetings and I just needed a postcard for 2024. I couldn't get it. So, going from that example to actually using all these technologies in production and especially for larger enterprises where the brand concerns are really big. I'm really not sure how quickly this could be used at scale.

Onur Polat: 23:38

My point of view is all this AI, all the generative AI, I think it's like a 10x, 15x multiplier for individual peoples creativity, but I still see the human element in the loop.

Onur Polat: 24:01

So if you ask me, do you think by using these AI based technologies, can agencies deliver more potent feeds 10 times faster? Can you create five AB tests instead of one AB test in the same time period? It would have been a solid yes from my side, but if the question is around whether we could immediately plug in and play these, I have my concerns and, like I said, these concerns are less of a concern for smaller businesses and more of a concern with enterprise. At the same time, I'm also thinking maybe, instead of using these offers from platforms like Google or Facebook, I think the enterprises might be also in a good position to access these models themselves and to use them, not necessarily isolated to a specific channel, but for all their activities, including the on-site experience. So I would say that that's what I think about it. I think a human still needs to read and approve all these things, and it will be like that for quite some time.

Mike Ryan: 25:29

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, well, there's some different things to address there. But I mean, google is also making some AI available for on-site search, for example, like Vertex AI. They have a recommendation AI, they have an on-site search AI for people using their cloud solution. But there's something about having these things because they're not really. Yeah, they're very specifically designed to facilitate your use of their ad platforms and to an extent, that's fair enough. But I just think there's a missed opportunity. Where people used to look at the search terms reports in Google Ads and get data that for other topics in their business. There was this idea to turn channel data from Google Ads and learn more of that for the business or across the business, and I think you can still do that, but to a certain extent. But it does the way that they build their product. Things are just very much locked into the UI and sometimes they're adding new reports or insights, but they're not exportable the way you might expect. Yeah, it's an interesting choice of theirs.

Onur Polat: 26:55

And here's the thing we also want the experience to feel holistic, right? So if I see an ad after I click the ad when I land on a website or an app, I want that transition to be smooth. So if I see a certain background on the ad and if I see a completely different looking pair of shoes on the product detail page, I'm not sure if that's great, right? So, like I said, maybe for smaller businesses it's better than not having some kind of journey at all, but a lot of mid and large enterprises, they spend a lot of time, they spend a lot of effort and energy and resources on building the storylines right, and in that sense, yeah, I have my reservations for the time.

Mike Ryan: 27:50

Yeah, I mean that's a good point. It's not necessarily end to end and maybe Google will address that. I mean, I think that they're aware of the importance of expectations between ad click and landing page and stuff like that. But it feels a bit open To your point that this is probably a better fit for smaller businesses than enterprise. I agree with you and I think Google sort of agrees with that as well. From at Google Marketing Live they had sort of mentioned that.

Mike Ryan: 28:23

Yeah, actually I've got to quote the features of Merchant Center that larger retailers know and love won't be going anywhere and that they're committed to rolling out the new version at a responsible pace when users basically that there's going to be feature parity and stuff like that. So it sounds like to take it seriously. But I'm also a bit skeptical of these solutions. I think you mentioned earlier kind of in the loop, and yeah, there's always people talk about in the loop and out of the loop and I think that there's a third position there as well which is kind of being like on the loop, where you're not taking direct controls or like is a very highly automated system but you're still in this very much as supervisory or editorial capacity, and I think that's position will be. Spending a lot of time sitting in the months and years ahead is in this kind of editorial position.

Onur Polat: 29:26

But yeah, and I mean, since AI is the hot topic I think I might sound like the grumpy uncle here, but another thing I expect to happen is also, I think, as more and more of the general population understands about generating AI, I think soon we'll also get to a point where people will literally pick up the phone and they will ask the website support the image I'm looking at. Is it the real photo of the product or is it generated? I mean, this will come. I think that's also. I mean, based on all my previous life experience, not as a product manager, but as a consumer, I think we'll also get to that point.

Onur Polat: 30:13

People that will get more and more suspicious. It's like, I mean, how many of us enjoy talking to chatbots on the website? It was cool for a time. Why? Because you thought you were talking to a real person and now we all know it's not a real person. And yeah, that's the tricky part. And I think we all need to be very responsible how we implement these things, because it might also become a missed opportunity if this is not, if this is abused and not addressed properly.

Mike Ryan: 30:45

Yeah, it's a good point Again, like on that kind of end to end note, just really considering the customer and having a lot of empathy for the customer experience there. I think it's really important. So that's been a good discussion about feeds, which came out of a part of your recent past in your career. Thanks for sharing that. Now I'd like to talk about your current role a bit and we get back toward this topic of building a bit again, I guess. But can you give us an overview of the work you're doing, of your team? And yeah, I'd love to hear about that.

Onur Polat: 31:21

Yeah, so my team is called the paid traffic product team. It's part of a bigger traffic team which was inclusive the organic traffic. I have a great counterpart there, derek Mayen, a great SEO product manager, and then, as a whole, we are part of the consumer engagement within the Adidas digital products and what it means when we say a product team is such basically a product manager and solutions architect and a few engineers. We are completely dedicated with our time in relationship to paid traffic activities. So this is mostly around the performance marketing, but all paid traffic activities within the digital space falls under our scope and, as a tech oriented team, we basically support our markets with the tech capabilities they need to be really successful at what they do, which is really a performance.

Mike Ryan: 32:41

Yeah, thanks for that introduction. So I mean, I think one of the reasons I want to bring you on is because I find this idea of having a product manager role in this context really interesting, and I think part of it might come from the enterprise scale. It could be one of the reasons why, but I think it's also just a really a difference in philosophy and approach. How does being an internal product team or being a PM, how does that differ from a classic IT approach where other companies might put something on the IT backlog or they're waiting for some capability support from IT? How does it differ with the product approach?

Onur Polat: 33:30

Yeah, no, I think it's a good point and I think we really have to talk about the very basic product management. To talk about it, I would say, with the IT team approach, the problem belongs to the user and they have to come up with a solution and then they have to request the solution and somebody just executes it the person, the IT team which executes this. They're like okay, this is my ticket, I've done what I was asked to do in the ticket, that's it move to the next ticket. Whereas when you talk about product teams or product management, it's the product team which owns the problem by constantly interacting with our users who suffer from these problems or these challenges we invent on their behalf. I think this really summarizes it well. This is one of the phrases I really love about product management inventing on behalf of your users.

Mike Ryan: 34:59

Yeah, I like that phrase. I haven't heard that one. Is that trademark to you?

Onur Polat: 35:04

I'm pretty sure I heard it somewhere. It might be even Steve Jobs, I don't know.

Mike Ryan: 35:10

But it's a good one.

Onur Polat: 35:11

Yeah, I really like it. I also don't remember that I heard it as a product team. That's what we try to do. We really try to understand our users. Our users would also come to us with all kinds of requests. They would also think a certain way to solve a problem is the best way. That's also welcome. But we also try to understand what it is that exactly challenging them. Then we try to come up with creative solutions to address that. If you also think about all the products we use, I really doubt a user could have defined an iPhone at the time. You had bits and pieces here and there.

Onur Polat: 36:06

I want to be able to carry a phone around.

Onur Polat: 36:09

I want to be able to take photos easier, etc. But how it all came together? It happened because somebody invented it on behalf of the consumers. I think that would be the best way to look at it. Unfortunately, I cannot really go into details of our projects, but we just had a great first half. I would like to also shout out to my team, to Esra, to Vivek, to Kavit, to Arun, to my product team.

Onur Polat: 36:47

After one of those successful projects, our VP, bobby he actually made a comment. He said this is such a brilliant solution. I really doubt any single person could have asked your team to build this like that. It really came from the team. It was a brilliant solution. It turned out that way because our team really owned the problem. We really tried to look into the problem itself as if it's our problem. Another important bit is obviously every time I say a problem or challenge, I would also link that to a certain KPI or outcome. A problem or a challenge which prevents you from reaching a certain outcome or KPI, then when you own that space as a product team, that's different effects that come from.

Mike Ryan: 37:58

That's a key difference from, as you mentioned, receiving a ticket in this order, taking capability, checking the box and being relatively I don't know different ways of phrasing that maybe agnostic or naive to the problem, not having a deep understanding of the problem and not having really that core accountability to the KPI in the end as well. That's a solution. I think that's an excellent overview. I totally get you can't get into details there, but nevertheless I feel like that feedback about this is a solution that couldn't have been asked for. It's a really interesting way of illustrating that.

Mike Ryan: 38:45

You're also in a PM role and, by the way, I've worked as a PM in the past too. I know some of the we can call them daily joys or I don't know, but some of the things that go on in the life of a PM. You need to be an org chart whisperer or you need to be able to do a lot of facilitation and sometimes even lobbying. There's all kinds of things that come up. How do you bridge between internal teams? I think you were presenting recently about horizontal initiatives how to look at your slides about that. They were really interesting. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Onur Polat: 39:30

Yeah, first of all, it's really funny. You say bridges. I know a couple of people would now ask me in the following days are you scripting all these conversations? Because I just had an internal post after I finished an internal training. That's a great training for senior managers. I just finished that. At the end of that training you had. One of the expected outcomes is that you write an internal blog post to share your experience. The title of my blog post was Building Bridges with Nadi Nas. So yeah, I guess it's a universal need, since you also picked that exact phrase. And yeah, like you said, I recently joined I think in May the Product let's Summit when I had the chance to present my thoughts around leading horizontal initiatives, and again, a big shout out to Ruth and the Product Let team for organizing that.

Onur Polat: 40:48

So, building Bridges I think it's a tricky word. I think it's important to really understand why we find ourselves in those situations, I mean why we need the bridges in the first place, and I think it has a lot to do with companies getting bigger and everybody really focusing on their respective areas, and sometimes it gets harder and harder to move the needle on your own and then you really need many people to come together behind certain initiatives to take your company or enterprise to the next level, or to take your KPI to the next level. Right, I mean, it's definitely pragmatic. So what I observe with most people they think, by talking to these other teams, they can actually take care of this, like they think most people think the problem lies with the fact that nobody knows what the other teams are working. I think that's part of the story, and don't take me wrong I think there's great value in these interactions. Like I'm a big fan of casual coffee chats. I think there's a lot of things you can discover by just having a simple coffee or tea. If you're not into caffeine, even a 16-minute conversation can give you a lot of insight and can open the door for a lot of opportunities.

Onur Polat: 43:00

What I would suggest, and what I try to do, though, is I try to build these bridges by telling a story. So, instead of trying to build the bridges for the sake of building bridges, because we think the bridges would help us do more, I think the important thing is to come up with a narrative, because what unites people is an opportunity, it's a threat, it's a story, it's a narrative when people see that there's something happening bigger than their own bubble, they're attracted to it. And then when you have this narrative well established and well communicated and constantly communicated, I think that's when building these bridges gets much easier. So it is true that the product manager's life is not exactly easy, like you said, because we have to interact with all these teams and, yeah, it's taking the toll. Sometimes, right, when we both work from home, my wife just says you should be too much, you just talk way too much. Right, and she's right, and that's the price of being in this role. But it's not as difficult as it sounds in the sense that we need to understand as product managers, we are in the best position to create these narratives than to pull people into this.

Onur Polat: 45:08

And the founder of LinkedIn? I listened to Ray Hoffman, I think I listened to his podcast Message of Scale. In one of those she was talking about founders and he says the founders are like the drummers of a band, right, they constantly give the right rhythm for everyone. And I think all these org chart chaos and all these seemingly impossible bridges to be built are actually not that hard to build.

Mike Ryan: 45:50

Yeah, I mean there's a lot to unpack here, because it raises the question like, yeah, why do these bridges need to be built in the first place? And I'm just thinking in my head I mean I'm stepping a bit out of my wheelhouse here, but from what I think I can remember from history classes as a teenager, bureaucracy originated in China and it was an innovation and it helped things happen to compartmentalize and specialize to a certain extent. And yet now everyone talks about silos and things feel I don't know, over compartmentalized or people often associate bureaucracy as the opposite of innovation. But yeah, to your point, talking in and of itself isn't the cure. That's the story. Storylines are so important that things are comprehensible, memorable, that people understand the significance, because otherwise you're just creating lots of noise and over communicating. You know if you can tell a story, but it's almost a test, like probably not right to share that with a person.

Onur Polat: 47:04

And talking about silos, I think we are also sometimes giving those silos more credit than they deserve. And what do I mean by that? I think it's kind of natural this silos separate. I mean, sooner or later, if your company has tens of thousands of people.

Onur Polat: 47:27

I mean how are you going to manage this? And every time we talk about silos, I actually talk about this example, and this one is 100% my example. So if you think about all the groceries you do in a supermarket, I mean there could not be an environment where you could observe silos in a better way. Right, because the person who grows tomatoes they don't care about anything else, they grow tomatoes. You raise chickens to get eggs, you don't care. Some companies produce cheese, I don't know. Some companies produce pasta, et cetera, et cetera.

Onur Polat: 48:11

But think about it as a consumer. When you walk into the supermarket, are you telling to yourself oh my God, I cannot believe we have all these silos and all these people are creating all these things without talking to each other? No, I mean, it doesn't even cross your mind. You go into the supermarket, you have everything you need, because there's someone, there's an orchestrator, which is the supermarket operator in this example, who makes sure these silos interact in the best way so that the consumer, the end user, can enjoy the totality of all the individual work all these silos produce.

Onur Polat: 49:05

So, in that sense, I don't necessarily think silos are bad per se. I think what is really missing is we don't always have the right setup to show how these silos produce a meaningful whole, and I think that's where we should be focusing on, rather than constantly bashing the silos. Yes, do we have too many silos? Yes, should it get less? Yes, can we get rid of them? I doubt it, and in the other areas of life I also see lots of silos. But as long as you manage to make them work for the greater good, I think it's a problem.

Mike Ryan: 50:02

Yeah, I mean, I think those are wise words there, and I'm just looking at the time when we're coming up on our time box. So before I let you go, I want to jump on one last topic here. People talk about the CMO role and it has a famously short lifespan. And some people say it's shifting toward like chief technology officer or because of the vast amount of more tech out there and how technical marketing inherently is these days. And some people say that it's shifting more toward the financial officer because it's so core to a business it's typically a pretty big item on the balance sheet and I mean, what do you think about statements like this? Where do you stand?

Onur Polat: 50:50

Yeah, so in my view, it's the marketing topic which is becoming more of a CTO topic or more of a CFO topic. Yes, there's a big responsibility that falls on the CMOs to communicate this better, but I think it was a Harvard Business Review article where I also saw how short the average pen is for a CMO is. So that's the thing, like, I think CMOs are getting a lot of heat, which they don't necessarily deserve, and at the same time, I think they need to get better at technology topics or they need to get better at explaining themselves to the finance organization. But at the same time, I also see the marketing is really becoming more of a CTO topic or more of a CFO topic. What do I mean by that? Especially with all the privacy concerns and all the data regulations, et cetera, et cetera. The CTOs really have to be hands-on when it comes to digital marketing activities, and maybe it's also about time we stop changing digital marketing, because all marketing pretty much all marketing became digital business. So the CTOs and I'm somewhat experiencing that right. I mean, if you think about our product team, in the end my engineers would report into a CTO right, and so that would already give me an idea about how all these topics are becoming more and more technology-driven topics. So in that sense, the CTOs are getting involved more and more and it will only increase. And similarly, on the CFO side of the things, I also think and yeah, I'm probably stepping out of my grade here, like talking about C-level topics, but still I would like to share my perspective.

Onur Polat: 53:12

Another thing I observe is also I think CMOs, chief marketing officers, need more flexibility when it comes to funding. What do I mean by that? We are not living in 80s, 90s or early 20s, 2000s, where you could just create a yearly plan and stick to it. I'm also thinking there are more and more real-time opportunities for digital marketing, which you could not have with TV advertising, with billboard advertising, with radio advertising, etc. Etc. You can really tap into people's lives via all these advertising platforms, etc. Etc. Like TikToks, reels, threads, twitter, whatever, whichever you prefer. And in order to take these real-time actions, I think the understanding of the CFO when it comes to marketing activities also needs to be at a very high level. That's why I'm thinking the marketing cannot be really left to a specific function anymore. I think it should be like a side function for everyone in the organization.

Mike Ryan: 54:45

So having that awareness and or responsibility or having this kind of just baked into more roles. There is an interesting idea To your point. It's not like TV planning or planned media buying, scheduled media buys or stuff like this. It's so real-time, it's so dynamic. There's much more interactivity If you're advertising. As soon as you're advertising on social media, that is a living organism, that your participants or an ecosystem or something like that.

Onur Polat: 55:25

It's so different than I would just refer to your post about Amazon Prime and how it's going to affect the PPCs, right, or I don't know. I think you mentioned how are they called? Temu, yeah, temu, or yeah Temu, yeah Temu entering the game and now things are changing suddenly, right, and how can you foresee this?

Mike Ryan: 55:51

It's not foreseeable for sure. And yeah, I think I've just about got to let you go, sadly, because I'm really enjoying the conversation, but any final words or last thoughts you want to leave us with.

Onur Polat: 56:08

Well, thanks a lot for having me. It's my first podcast ever. Really, it's a great honor to be here. And yeah, when it comes to fellow product managers or aspiring product managers, please do find me on LinkedIn and let's connect. I'd really like to share my learnings. And yeah, and just make sure, if you are into digital marketing, just make sure you check all my posts on LinkedIn. I learned a lot from them.

Mike Ryan: 56:49

Thanks for plugging me. I appreciate that and, yeah, I can't believe it's your first podcast, first of many, I'm sure. I think once people hear you, they'll want you on their shows too.

Onur Polat: 56:59

Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

Mike Ryan: 57:01

Thank you too.

Onur Polat: 57:02

Bye.

Mike Ryan: 57:03

Bye. Thanks for listening to Growing Ecommerce, and if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider sharing it with coworkers, friends or within your professional network. We really appreciate it. This podcast is produced by Smarter Ecommerce, also known as Mech. To learn more, visit Smarter-Ecommercecom.