This week, Yonca Dervişoğlu, VP of Marketing for EMEA at Google, talks to Eric about so many things from how she makes sure she has time to spend on her prioritises, how the pandemic has helped her connect to her teams, and how she approaches new roles and new challenges.
Yonca discusses how her family and childhood experience moving from Istanbul to California – with its often unbridled optimism about technology – have shaped her and led her to where she is today, the CMO of many markets for Google, and how this has informed her priorities for EMEA’s role in the future of technology. While EMEA can tend towards being overly concerned with new tech, Yonca actively seeks to push the region to embrace a more active role in new technology with a focus on the values particular to it, including privacy and equality.
This is a great conversation for anyone interested in the bigger picture. If you want to hear more from Google’s head of marketing for EMEA, you can find Yonca on LinkedIn.
If you prefer to watch this episode, visit (and subscribe!) to Rival’s YouTube channel.
To listen to this conversation on your preferred streaming platform, click here.
Transcript
Yonca: It's really simple. Know the user, know the magic, connect the two.
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler, and this is Scratch Bringing You Marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone. My guest today is Yonca Dervişoğlu. She is the vice president of marketing for Europe, middle East and Africa for Google, a company that you might have heard of. She's been a Google for more than 12 years and overseas teams in 35 countries. She's responsible for marketing everything from hardware to consumer apps to ads platforms. So she's got a very broad perspective on modern marketing to drive the growth of all of those businesses For Google. She also co-founded Google Arts and Culture, an initiative that has trained millions of people to date across EMEA and also helped millions of people find jobs prior to Google. Yonca just spent a decade at Unilever and four years at Yahoo in the early web onepoint.com era. She sits on the Heineken supervisory board, the Serpentine Galleries Innovation Circle, Brookings Institute, global Leadership Council. I could go on and on.
She sits on many different boards and actually it's one of the conversations that we talk about how she's kind of expanded her career in that direction. Yonka is also an expert tarot card reader, an Apple connoisseur. Unfortunately, we did not get to talk about those, so I'll have to come back to her on that. We did talk about some brands that she's fascinated by, some trends that she's very curious about right now and spent a lot of time kind of talking about what mattered most to getting her to where she is today as CMO of one of the biggest brands in the world. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Yonca. Hey, Yonca, how you doing? Thanks so much for joining me.
Yonca: Great to be here, Eric.
Eric: Great. To kick things off, I'd love to hear about a brand that you are fascinated by right now and obviously it can't be. Google has to be another one.
Yonka: Oh man. Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me here. A brand that I'm fascinated about, there's a couple. One is Gucci, not just because of the amazing movie, which felt like a two hour long ad for Gucci. That was just amazing. But also because I just am about to join their board, the board of Caring, which is the company that owns Gucci, San Lauren, Alexander McQueen, and I'm fascinated by the brand in some way. They're very experimental and great in digital In some ways. I look at their website and think about buying something on the Gucci website versus other websites like Netta Port matches the whole journey of discovery and to purchase to return and the whole experience. I just think A, they're amazing, but B, they have so much more to do and that excites me. It's hard to separate the marketer from the shopaholic as I look at these brands, but Gucci definitely, or San Lauren, all those caring brands really excite me both personally and professionally. When I was interviewing for the board they were saying and telling me about the board and stuff, and at the end they said, and this is the kind of salary a board member gets and you get this card, it's a 50% discount. I was like, what sold? So I'm not sure if it's real or if I imagined it, but if that's the case, I was like, you should totally lead with that then. So I'm excited about that and I'm excited about We're going to say something. There's one more brand that Tell you.
Eric: Well, no, I do want to hear about that. I have to say about the movie. Oh, so I read the book and the movie I actually didn't finish and I think it was well done. I could not get past the cognitive dissonance of why they were Italian. Yes, speaking in English, but with heavily and very bad Italian accents. I just couldn't make it work. Yeah. I'm like, we know that they're American actors. I know. Just have them speak in English. It would be so much better.
Yonca: I know it was funny.
Eric: Don't know, I just couldn't get past that. But as a brand, I think it's very interesting.
Yonca:I feel you. I felt that way and unfortunately I read this great Tom Ford article about the movie before the movie and it sounds like what's her name come on Lead Actors, lady Gaga. Lady Gaga. It's like, why does Lady Gaga have a Moscow? She sounds more Moscow than Milan. And I was like, I wish I hadn't heard that because the whole movie, I was thinking of that when I wa, but it was great. And then you've got Jared Lito that's like so over the top.
Eric: I know. Maybe it's because I speak Italian and so to me it's like, it's kind of like when people try to put on Bad Boston accents. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Put the hat on right now you're asking what this hat means. Boston Red Sox. Oh, that's what it is. Okay. Anyway, I just couldn't get past that. But I will say it's very interesting. My backgrounds coming up in the agency world and kind of social digital media. I think we worked with Cartier when I was at Vayner Media, but in general I always found that luxury brands were so slow to adapt new channels and new media and so precious, and I think that's the right word about traditional media channels needing to be the places that their brands were represented, print TV out of home, and they were so reluctant to go onto social and now of course they're there because it's been a while and we've proven that luxury brands can build brand and drive growth in social, but I always thought that was a huge opportunity and a lot of what we're looking at is challenger brands, and I think you see Challenger luxury brands, that's a big area of opportunity that they have against the incumbents, the carings of the world and that portfolio of brands is that they're just faster moving to adopt new media and new technology and new channels to reach this audience.
Yonca: Yeah, totally. Totally. But I'm really happy to see that caring or asking all the questions, what do we do about Deep Metaverse? What do we do with NFTs? And I'm like, actually, your website speed could improve before you ask all these questions and your omnichannel strategy, which we call how do you show up on the store versus the online and how does it all seamlessly become one experience, perhaps a shared experience with friends when you choose to think about that more. But it's great to see even the non challenger brands so excited about the future and what it means for them and always pushing boundaries.
Eric: Did you see the Metaverse fashion show that happened recently?
Yonca: No, I heard about it, but I haven't
Eric: Seen, I just read about it.
Yonca: I heard it was underwhelming, but I read that because I work with Derek, so lucky to call him a colleague and a friend. He and he leads our YouTube fashion and beauty. That's what he leads globally. And so he's always a great insight and I basically heard that it was a great effort and got a lot of interest, but little bit lots of learnings, let's say. Little bit ahead in its time.
Eric: Yeah, b. I think that's where a lot of things are in the N F T Web three space for brand is people kind of experimenting, trying to figure it out. I mean, the other thing that is definitely happening is there's a good amount of innovation for the sake of innovation, people wanting headlines, not just on the client side. Agencies really push for that as well. But I think, and I hope pretty soon you're going to see some of these brands that either have experimented a little bit and gotten learnings or have been waiting and measuring twice to cut once with their activation and NFTs and Web three that I think are going to do something very different. And I think the biggest difference is going to be a lot of what brands have done so far has been focused on ownership. Hey, you get a virtual t-shirt from Balenciaga that you can wear around the metaverse, and I think the bigger opportunity is actually access, so the holder of this token get to come to the backstage version of the next fashion show that we do. So it's oversimplified and there's so much more that goes into it, but I'm really interested in the next wave of N F T and brand activations and what that's going to look like. Yeah,
Yonka: But I mean I really welcome. I totally agree. We always think the first TV ads were print ads on a TV screen, so it's like the virtual that you mentioned, but it's actually going to be about experiences, access to experiences. You're so right. But I just welcome this whole experimentation and leaning forwards from the fashion industry because on one hand they can be quite anti online. I have one friend who's a CMO of a big fashion brand and she's like, tell actually my title is marketing, but what's the opposite of marketing when you're trying to make it so exclusive and so hard to get? That's kind of my job. And the luxury world is really good at that as well, on marketing or it's actually another way of marketing really.
Eric: Yeah, exactly.
Yonka: But then,
Eric: Sorry, I jumped in. So what was your second brand?
Yonka: No, no. I really want to tell you this other story that you reminded me of because there's one end is fashion brands leaning almost so much towards the future that they miss the basic things that they could be doing right now, putting their brands online and offline experience well together, looking at that data in one coherent way making their apps and websites much faster, much more user friendly, just the nitty gritty basics of online and offline. But I just applaud that they are leaning so forwards and I'm like, no, no, no. Why don't you just focus on these basics first and then we can experiment with the future. But that's in strike. Historic contrast to my early days when I joined the internet, and I remember I was at the Dorchester Hotel, this fancy conference with lots of CMOs and I was like the little Yahoo CMO of Europe and with the smallest budgets and the CMO with the biggest budget and was giving a keynote speech and he was the CMO of a big auto brand. So I listened very carefully and then at the end I raised my hand. He said, okay, I said, this is the year 2006, so it has to be put in that context, but still, we still have these kinds of CMOs today, which is why I'm applauding the other CMOs that are leaning towards experimentation. I said 80% of people who are looking to buy a car start looking online probably with a brand in mind like yours, but they may or may not end up at the dealer of that brand depending on how that online search goes. So with that in mind, what percentage of your budget is online? And he said to me, not just to me, to the whole room, like zero. And he was really proud of it and he was like, this is just a marginal thing that you're talking about and it's probably going to pass. And there's still a lot of people like that who just don't want to do anything or think, I don't know, think it's not for them. So really were at that point you were making about challenger brands or really good at not being like that and embracing online experimenting, making mistakes and moving on. So that's one thing you reminded me of. And then the other brand is another fashion retail brand. It's Mavi in Turkey. They are like the Gap, banana Republic gap of Turkey. So they're very famous here, hundreds of stores around the country and in fact a global company with presence and other countries and much more accessible. And actually they also provide mainly jeans to probably some of the designer brands that you wear, but it's been actually made by them. So there's amazing company. I know the founders, the founding family I've been on their board and I've learned so much about their journey and what's the role of marketplaces that sell their products versus their online stores versus offline stores. What does the brand mean? What does it stand for? How do you do marketing in this day and age, it's been really, really exciting for me to learn from them and about this whole industry in the process. So those are the two brands, Mavi and Gucci, they even rhyme.
Eric: So I want to go off script for a second if they'll allow me, because you mentioned already, and I know you're involved in so many organizations, board advisor, et cetera. I'm just curious if there's a way, cause I think there's people listening and also for me, I just announced yesterday I took another board position with a FinTech based out of Vancouver, Canada that's trying to basically build a technology platform for family offices, which is an area financial services that's very traditional and outdated. And I've done a couple advisory and board roles before. But with your experience, I'm very curious how you approach those roles. Do you have a way of thinking about your role, your involvement, what you focus on? For people listening, including myself who are taking on board roles or looking to take on board or advisory roles, what advice would you give them on how to try to add the most value when your time is so limited and you might not always be so up to date on everything that's going on within the business?
Yonka: It's a great, great question and I've certainly asked this question to many, many people and have had a few board roles now. So let me share my experience and my learnings. One is be in purposeful about what you want out of the board experience. For example, mine is I started saying it's learning. Well, learning, you could listen to TED talks in your own time not or go to a few conferences. And so you really need to be mindful of what you're trying to do. And is the board role really the right answer to that? And I'm going to guess yes, you know, because you want to step out of your own area, which in my case is tech. But I wanted to go back to boards like C on companies like Unilever sort of more not the tech world. And I wanted to expand my horizons and I wanted to be able to operate at that level, which is a different, not just the sort of what a big responsibility it is, but it's also not an executive role. It's called a non-executive director. What does that even mean and how do you best add value? Just gaining that experience was great for me. So first is know what you want from the board experience and approach it with that in mind. Second is, okay, you've done that. You really want a board experience what your reasons are. Don't just say what I did in the beginning. Hey and so, and you get approached a lot by boards or head hunters that are actually specialized in placing people on boards. Can you drop my name when you're not interested? That's a very reactive approach as opposed to my dream boards would be these ones I'm just going to dream and then trying to go after them. So that's my second advice. And then the third advice is, or learning rather is you, I decided it's this board, it's happening. I'm now asking friends, should I do this board? And one of my friends said to me, you need to know whether it's a mushroom board or not. I said, what's a mushroom board? He said, the CEO keeps it in the dark and feeds it. Shit. I was like, really <laugh> And I thought that was interesting. So what do you do with that information? What if the board you're joining is a mushroom board? And so I guess that it doesn't really matter. It's not my full-time job. I'm there to gain experience and support the CEO and the board to the extent that they need me, which I realize isn't just in terms of my digital and marketing and women. Those are the three hats that I bring to every board I join. But it's actually, I've learned so much at Google about how we do compensation, how we set metrics company culture or AI impacting this industry or the retail industry when it was Heineken or cybersecurity. I could bring so much from my company that would help this board that it doesn't really matter what kind of a board it is or not. But it was an interesting anecdote. So those are my three and a half learnings because the last one is once what kind of a board you've joined, you can still add value no matter what kind of aort it is. And you don't just add value by your experience, which is a lot. That's the starting point, but you can add value in many, many other ways beyond your experience that even you didn't think you would be adding value. Yeah,
Eric: I like that. Thank you for entertaining me. Going off script, we can come back on script. We've gotten through one question in 20 minutes, so at this rate we'll be done at some point tomorrow, but I think that's the sign of a good conversation. Okay. So next question, and obviously we've touched on a little bit of this right now, but feel free to unpack something we've already touched on or go in a different direction. What are you most curious about right now in the role that you have in the seat that you have in the industry?
Yonka: I've always been super curious about the future, really. That's my thing. Even when I was at Unilever, I was working in innovation and I was like, men and women don't need to make the washing easier because it was all about powders to tablets and how that makes washing easier. I was like, they just don't want to do the washing. Who wants to do washing? Who wants to take something to the dry cleaner? Why can't we have laser pens that zap the stain off and steam cupboards that don't mean you have to wash or or iron anything. And surely in the 21st century we should have answers to these questions. And I did work on a stain zapping pen that also zapped the fabric out of the clothes. So I hope someone's working on it. But I'm always excited about the future and technology and that's sort of is what technology can do for people.That's always, and what more importantly people will do with technology. I'm watching the Vikings series right now and they were basically really good users of technology, navigational ships, all kinds of, so I'm always fascinated in when no matter what I watch or do about technology, I guess the thing that's most, most curious or spending my emotional and mental capacity on right now as a part of my work, not just personally is what's happening in Ukraine the invasion of Ukraine and how we can keep our team and Googler safe, whether they're in Ukraine or working for an American company in Russia and how our products can help people on the ground and what we can do with the humanitarian response for refugees with our products. And also with the 35 million that we raised our, our ceo Sundar just met with Polish and Slovenian PMs, the two of the Kiev three as they're called, the three prime ministers that went to Kiev recently. So I think there's a lot we can do to help there and that's sort of top of mind for me right now.
Eric: Yeah, I mean we talked a little bit about that before we pressed record, but I don't know, I find myself kind of perspective is everything. And even this conversation up until now, it's you just, sometimes I feel like I forget everything else that's going on, not forget. But I think perspective is so important and it's so important to recognize the things that really matter. And also like we were talking about and knowing a bit of what you told me and just mentioned now that Google is doing it, I think everybody needs to do their part, whether it's this, it's something else, it's something that I'm really passionate about. And obviously the scale of what we're doing at Rival is barely registers on the map. But I really hope that in general, particularly with the way that general consumer expectations and attitudes towards businesses and brands are changing and then change doesn't happen gradually.It usually happens in kind of staircase moments. And I'm hoping the brands and how they've been forced to react to what's happened here, I'm hoping this is a step change moment for brands to take a little bit more responsibility about how they spend their money and about how they build their businesses and really having a broader approach to growth that's not just focused exclusively or vast majority on maximizing shareholder profits. So I know that's not exactly what you said, but it's what I thought of hearing what you were talking about and I think is a big opportunity that I hope continues and doesn't just kind of a blip on the map and then goes back to the way that it was.
Yonka: Yeah, no, no, no, I really don't think so. I think you make a really important point, and it's the bigger point of the smaller point that I was making that it ladders up to, which is companies can't just say wash their hands off of their responsibilities in these moments. And there's so much for companies and brands, no matter how small or large or whichever industry they're in that they need to do and people expected of us. When you look at the Edelman Trust barometer, I really love that research. They come out every year around doubles. So people are looking more and more to CEOs to do something in these situations. Stakeholder capitalism, it's not about responsibility to shareholders, but stakeholders, the community that we operate in our employees much more than. So I think the world is absolutely moving in that direction. But we've done things like handling obviously being the only source of truth or the other side of the story, the true information in Russia, for example, with YouTube and search still it's still going. We're not making any money or spending any money in marketing in Russia, that's for sure. So the revenues down to zero and marketing budgets down to zero, but search and YouTube are still very much up and running and until the Russian government stops it, it will be up and running. And you can imagine how important that is as a source of global information to Russians. And then I found myself marketing something called an air raid app. It's an app that the Russian government and a Ukraine, sorry, Ukrainian government and a Ukrainian developer developed that because the sirens aren't working during air raid, people don't know that an air raid is approaching and they don't know where to shelter. So there's now an app that we promoted on our homepage and it tells people, it gives them a notification that there's an air rate coming and where they need to go. And when we started promoting it, it was at 1 million downloads and it got to 4 million and I was like, yay. And then I was like, what? That's like 3 million people in 24 hours that downloaded an app so they could hear about some bombs above their heads. It's just so I don't think I ever thought I'd be marketing such a thing, but then I'm really proud that everybody we debated, could we do it like this? Could we do it like this? We could do it better. We just said this is about speed. We've got to do things with speed. And I was just so in awe of my colleagues and how everyone I know whether in Google or outside got together and helped with things like million things like this through our products and the humanitarian efforts and all the other companies. And I think everybody's been surprised at how unanimous the reaction has been, right with Western companies getting together.
Eric: So This is a new thing that's been unfortunately put on your plate in recent weeks. But I'm curious to kind of broaden the scope a little bit and just talk a bit about what does a day in the life either now or normally look like for you? Because a CMO of Google for amea, it's a lot of markets. There's a lot that's under the Google umbrella these days, hardware, consumer apps, advertising of course. I'm curious and I think our listeners would be curious just to hear what a day in the life looks like for you.
Yonka: What I eat and when I sleep and exercise in family time, those are pretty much fixed. And especially in the pandemic, I found myself in these routines. I always pretty much eat the same stuff and definitely for breakfast and cherish dinner with my daughters, tried to go to bed sensibly, definitely between work and bed, I need to switch the brain off. It used to be like I need to watch it. It years ago, CSI just put my brain to solve it. I need to solve a crime before I go to bed, something. So now it's bridgeton, it varies. It was vikings, but there's definitely a huge need to switch the brain off. And then I go to bed and I read a little reading something called the Anatomy of Peace this week. So I do have quite a routine, which is just about to get mega disrupted with hybrid going back to work in April that we're doing as Google for the first time in two years. We're going back to work three days a week. So it's going to look different. I'm going to be commuting to work again at least three days a week. I'm going to be traveling much more, but I'll still try to keep to those boundaries. So I start with my boundaries and then work-wise so what happens during the day, that really, really varies. But I think there's three areas. One of them is making sure I'm working on the key priority areas. I'm quite clear maybe not on a daily, but on some friends of mine do it on a daily basis. The top three things I need to do today, I mean I have my daily to-do list, but I think I have top priority projects for the next several weeks. And then my assistant, who's my much more than an assistant, she's like, she's called my asis executive business partner. She and I agree no meetings outside these priorities. So working on the priorities. Second is team time, whether that's in just one-to-ones or with teams. And I've been doing this a lot more in the pandemic. I feel like I have a team across 35 countries and I've gotten, I used to have this feeling that I had to always travel to them to get to be closer to them and to understand them and their user's needs and their customer's needs better and for them to hear directly from me. But the pandemic's been a great equalizer and I've gotten to tee times with my teams with no agendas or just checking in on them. And I've met more people from my team, gotten closer to them also because we all had this big shared experience of the pandemic. So I'm really grateful to that and I will continue to do that. So spending time on my priorities, checking on my teams, and then just making sure I'm sane and keeping boundaries on my wellbeing. It's a constant effort and I'm kind of a hyper person, so I'm my worst enemy. But those three would be my daily routine.
Eric: It is a constant, we talk about work life balance and one of the big things that I'm passionate about with that is I don't think there's such thing as the right balance for everyone. I think there's the right balance for each person. So I think it's less talked about now post covid and more working from home and more work flexibility and all that. But kind of the whole idea of when hustle culture got canceled, I'm glad that it did because I don't think that should be the expectation for everyone. And obviously having spent seven years working for Gary Vaynerchuk, I literally come from that <laugh> probably the epicenter of where a lot of that came from. And I think it's good that it got balanced, but I think it's so important that people understand balance is what you want it to be based on your priorities. And the worst thing is to have somebody else set them, whether it's, and this is probably the bigger risk, somebody who's telling you that you need to work a hundred hours a week if you ever want to have a chance to be successful because that can obviously lead down the wrong road. So can choosing balance in a different way that's not right for you. So I think that's the thing I always push is like you got to understand what balance means to you and then figure out and make sure that you try to maintain it as much as possible knowing that very, very few days are actually going to have the balance that you want and it's a constant effort. So I'm curious, looking back over the course of your career what do you think mattered most? And if it's a few things, that's fine, of course, but what mattered most to getting you to where you are right now?
Yonka: First of all, I think my family I grew up in Istanbul, but then my dad was teaching electrical engineering. He's a professor at University of California in Berkeley. When I was in primary or as the American sale elementary school age and living in California at such an age where it really got into the, who shaped me were formative years, who shaped who I am and how I see the world and the experience it gave me from growing up in a very protectionist economy in Turkey where nobody traveled and you couldn't even hold foreign currency at the time to living in California, I'd never seen so many escalators and traffic lights. I was like, wow, they have so many traffic lights and just uc, Berkeley, which was next to Lawrence Hall of Science. And my first computer, I was learning how to do basic and fortune in the computer club, which was an elective course. It was, it's really dating me now. But they were really exciting times for the technology world, my dad being an electrical engineer. So I think those were really, they really shaped who I am today. So I think I owe a lot to my family for shaping who I am and my love of technology. And it's made me think about the Californian approach technology. It's like Yeha and a little bit unbridled, optimistic and a little irresponsible and not thinking about the unintended consequences of it. And then there's a Chinese way of approaching technology, which is again, super ambitious world class and by any metric but different, it's more top down, isn't it? And I just feel like there is a way that Europe can lead in technology a third way to the Californian and the Chinese Way. And that is the European way. When I say Europe, middle East Africa, way of approaching technology a bit more thinking about who we leave behind and not a bit more with the values that we have here, like privacy liberte, So that's really my dream and my vision and everything that I do, every board role I take, every decision I make, every priority I work on tries to help that vision for EM'S role in the future. Little bit too much worrying about technology and not enough pioneering in technology today in EMEA and especially in continental Europe. And how can we push that? So that's a huge thing. And going back to the kind of people, so when I was growing up, it was my parents and then at Unilever where I learned the foundations of marketing and my bosses there that hired me for Fulkert, Snape Zep. Funnily, I've had more female bosses than male bosses my whole life. I wonder if that's a coincidence. And then moving into Yahoo, which was 20 years ago, and Haslet another amazing woman, she said to me, are you going to sell soap powder the rest of your life? And cause it was very hard for me to leave Unilever, then leaving Unilever, joining the digital world, and then I became a mom. So I'm not thinking of changing any jobs. Thank you. I've got a big life change already. And then that's when I met Lorraine, my boss of 15 years now who said to me, come to Google. And I was like, Google, it's just a search engine. And do they even do marketing? What do these people do anyway? And that's how I met them. And I was like one person after the other mind blown every interview and I genuinely, and she was like, you're going to open, are you going to open offices in so many emerging markets? And I'm like, if half of what she's saying is true, I'm in. And it was more than it than a hundred percent of it. True. So I really owe a lot to people like Lorraine, people like Fr who got me into the tech world, my bosses in the Unilever world that I learned so much from that I live off every day, every meeting I live off Suffolk, I learned at Unilever. So I think I'm glad you asked me that question because there's so many people I feel greatly indebted to. And I have to say Matt Britain who is the president of Europe, middle East Africa, and I want to say be because he's great, but also having spoken about all my bosses and the women who have shaped my life, he's a man who's really championed me, given me opportunities. You can do this. No I can't. Yes you can and you'll enjoy it. I'm like, really? And I think we women, well men and women need such people in our lives that give us the opportunities and the confidence and the visibility. So yeah, hugely grateful.
Eric: And I totally believe that careers lives are built as much on who as what and how they influence you is as big a factor as anything else. So young, I'm just conscious of Tom. I'd love to, let's maybe go to the question about your thoughts on rules for modern marketing. I'd love to cover that off before we have to jump off. So from your perspective, this long career working in multiple different industries, I'm sure you have thoughts from all of that experience. But sitting where you sit now and for the marketers that are listening, what would you say are the most important rules for modern marketing in the world of 2022?
Yonka: I'm going to quote Lorraine and Andy burnt my dear friend and colleague, Andy Burnt, and Lorraine Tohill, my boss. It's really simple. Know the user, know the magic, connect the two. That's what we marketing people do. We need to know the diverse area of users really well. And I got that training from Unilever actually, where we used to do house visits and try to understand people and it was incredible, just in addition to crazy research. And at Google of course that's combined with data. So know the user, know the magic, what is it that you can offer them in a unique way that it may meet that meets a big need? And connect the two, tell the story and tell it in diverse ways from diverse voices. And I love that. I enjoy that. It's an ongoing challenge.
Eric: I really like that. One of the things that I say, cause I think often, particularly in big incumbent organizations, marketing ends up playing the role of promoting the product. And actually I do think it's more fundamental than it sounds. The role of marketing is ultimately to connect the product to the consumer to drive growth of the business. And I think there's a fundamental difference there, but I think the way that you describe it of know the user, know the magic and connect the two, I like that and I might steal it going forward. So unfortunately we are out of time. The last question I have for you is what is one thing that people should do differently after listening to this conversation in your perspective today?
Yonka: Yes, you would never guess this about me, but I'm super excited about metrics. So I have a friend who told me that in his Harvard mba, he thought the finance and the accounting and econ economics classes were the most important. But then there was this one really no-brainer class called alignment around the right metrics that he now is a very successful businessman keeps referring back to. And so what do you want to achieve and how will you be measured for it? I spent crazy amount of time and I get it wrong, and I chase as leaders especially, I think it's one of the most important things we can do is to set the right metrics towards the right outcomes that our teams can uniquely deliver. So for example, sales of devices is a shared metric, but the retail experience score can be something that marketing can be uniquely measured on setting the right metrics that we are accountable for that we can make an outsized impact on.I spend a crazy amount of time months on these because I have so many different areas. So I spend a lot of ti and I've done metrics that provide output but not great outcome. So I set the wrong metrics, I go back to the drawing board and I really try to, I spend a lot of time what's the right outcome and how do we measure it? And so I cannot tell you how much time I continue to spend on ti spend on that. And how as leaders, promotions, priorities, performance evaluations, motivation, focus ideas just by changing metrics. I've had so much different conversations, quality of conversations, and I could go on and on about this, but I guess to boil it down, I would say be very intentional about as a leader, what kind of outcome that you want your teams to deliver, because it's one of the most important things that you could do.
Eric: The phrase that we use, which is similar is it's about outcomes, not outputs. And I think that's where people can kind of get distracted sometimes. All right. Well thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation. I know our listeners will too. Lastly, just to kind of tie it off, if people want to connect with you, find out more about what you're up to, what Google's up with, everything you talked about today, where should we direct people to?
Yonka: You can find me on LinkedIn, Yonca Dervişoğlu Google. There's only one Yonca Dervişoğlu at Google, so should be easier to find it, find On LinkedIn.
Eric: Amazing. And thanks for saying your name again. It gives me a better chance of getting a right me intro than I'm going to do right now. Well, Yaja, thank you so much again. It was great to meet you and hope to cross paths with you soon in London.
Yonka: I hope so too, Eric. Great talking to you. Thanks a lot.
Eric: Take care.
Yonka: Take care. Bye.
Eric: Scratch is a production of Rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us, check out we are rival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me at eric@wearerival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it, and please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
