Esra Develops and Leads Global Marketing Initiatives in Silicon Valley

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#39 Esra Guler, 37 - Google
Esra Güler is a true technology evangelist with a 16-year marketing and business development career that has taken her from her hometown, Istanbul, to first London and then Silicon Valley. She is a senior marketing executive at Google, where she’s launched and managed a series of business and consumer marketing projects; most notably Google Partners, the company’s global channel program for ad agencies. She is currently the Head of Engagement Marketing for Google Express, one of Google’s latest enterprises in the consumer space.
Esra began her career at Google in the Istanbul office where she led business marketing efforts to introduce Turkish businesses to online advertising. Then she moved to London, where she built upon her emerging markets experience and took on the responsibility of getting British and Irish businesses online. There, she also grew Google’s first ad agency program that she had designed and piloted in Turkey and expanded it across Europe. Subsequently, she was transferred to the global headquarters in California, where she worked with executive leadership to define and deliver the strategic roadmap of Google Partners and was awarded Google’s Marketing Platinum Award for successfully managing the global rollout with an international team of 100+ people across 57 countries.

Prior to Google, Esra spent eight years in the new business development team of a Fortune Global 500 conglomerate, the Koç Group of Turkey, with a focus on high-tech and SMB finance. Esra credits much of her early professional success to her mentor, Ali Koç, who exposed her to a broad range of opportunities and encouraged her to take risks and think big. She co-founded an online business platform which served as a one-stop-shop for tech and financial services for small and medium-sized businesses. The platform was a joint initiative with Microsoft, and was endorsed by Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer himself during his visit to Turkey. She launched a partnership with Alibaba.com’s CEO, Jack Ma, to open up more than 50,000 local businesses to global markets. One of her proudest moments was introducing Jack Ma to the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, where he expressed his appreciation for the historic marketplace as inspirational for Alibaba.com. She also pioneered a platform to help hundreds of small Turkish companies obtain funding from the European Union (EU) and World Bank grants schemes for their development projects. This project was presented to European finance ministers as a success story at the Euromoney Central & Eastern European Forum in 2008, and also got her a nomination for “The Best Employee of the Year” competition among a hundred thousand employees.

As a youth in Istanbul, Esra attended Üsküdar American Academy where she developed an interest in international affairs and attended the Model United Nations conferences in the Netherlands and Ireland as a young diplomat to discuss and negotiate on foreign policy matters in a multinational community. She attended Bosphorus University where she earned her degree in Management Information Systems and was honored to be chosen to deliver the Commencement Address for her class in 2000.

Throughout her career, Esra has followed her passion to grow entrepreneurial ideas into strong businesses, in emerging and developed markets alike. She has succeeded in becoming a trusted leader in the business development and marketing spheres in three continents by challenging the status quo and pushing the boundaries with her innovation focus and relentless mindset that comes from her Turkish roots. She is also a strong believer in empowering women and encouraging workforce diversity. Therefore, she supports several causes to this end and partners with her sister Ayşenur Güler, a Google alumni, to connect Turkish women engineers with the opportunities in Silicon Valley and provide business and career mentorship to tech entrepreneurs and college students.
Last modified onSaturday, 06 May 2017 10:07