Meltem Günyüzlü Ateş
Marketing & AI Leader | Global Marketing Operations | MarTech & Marketing Transformation
A marketing leader with over 25 years of experience across management consulting, agency strategy, client leadership, country marketing, and global operations spanning more than 60 markets.
Meltem Günyüzlü Ateş has over 25 years of experience spanning management consulting, agency strategy and client relationship leadership, country marketing, and the management of global operations across more than 60 markets.
At British Council, she served as Regional Marketing Operations Director, leading centralized campaign and MarTech operations across more than 60 markets with a 14-person team based across 8 countries. She established a central operation producing more than 100 integrated marketing campaigns annually and connected an ecosystem of 55 websites, 39 languages, 157 social media channels, and 68 advertising accounts under a unified operating model.
She also led the organization’s first AI-enabled marketing initiatives, including AI-supported translation across 42 languages and creative automation deployed across 60 markets. She redesigned the centralized marketing agency ecosystem and previously served as Regional Marketing Lead and Türkiye Marketing Director.
On the agency side, she worked as Group Brand Director at McCann Erickson and MullenLowe, managing strategy, brand, and client relationships for more than 70 brands across 8 sectors, including Nestlé, Unilever, MasterCard, Coca-Cola, and Ülker.
Earlier in her career, she worked with AT Kearney on Akbank’s Yeni Ufuklar restructuring program. The bank’s strategic transformation during this period was later featured in the Harvard Kennedy School case “Akbank: A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste (A)”.
She holds the Chartered Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CFCIM) and Certified AI Professional (CAIP) designations. She is certified in the Artificial Intelligence Programme at Oxford University Saïd Business School and serves as a Global Responsible AI Ambassador (GCRAI). She also mentors startups through the Tech Istanbul program.
She translated Don Peppers and Martha Rogers’ Return on Customer into Turkish under the title Kazandıran Müşteri, published by Rota Yayınları in 2008.
Areas of Contribution
- AI transformation in marketing
- Embedding AI and automation into marketing operations
- AI governance and responsible AI frameworks
- AI literacy for professionals
- Designing marketing operating models
- MarTech selection and enterprise-wide implementation
- Creative automation and content production pipelines
- KPI architecture and marketing performance reporting
- Agency ecosystem design and management
- Building marketing teams and developing capabilities
- Marketing leadership mentoring for startups and scaleups
- Fractional CMO and advisory models
Areas of Expertise
AI in Marketing | AI Governance | Marketing Operations | MarTech | Marketing Performance Architecture | Content & Campaign Management