Most marketing careers read like a straight line up a single ladder. Cenk Bulbul's reads like a spiral. Same idea, wider and wider orbit. The idea he keeps circling is almost embarrassingly simple: what actually makes a person decide? He spent years in a university lab trying to measure it, then two decades testing the answer in the loudest arenas he could find - a strategy firm, an ad agency, the biggest video platform on earth, a retail-media juggernaut, and now a global bank.
Today he is Chief Marketing Officer for Santander Bank in the US and for Openbank, the group's digital bank, globally. It is the kind of title that sounds like a destination. Look at how he got here and it reads more like the natural next lap.
01 · THE THESISFeelings, measured
Before the corner offices, there was a dissertation. Bulbul earned a PhD in Marketing from New York University, where his research focused on how emotions influence the decisions consumers make. He paired it with an MBA in Finance from Carnegie Mellon - a combination that puts a spreadsheet and a feeling in the same head, which is rarer than it should be.
That academic grounding matters because it explains everything that follows. A lot of marketers learn tactics. Bulbul started from the underlying question and worked outward. When you begin with “why do people feel pulled toward this,” the specific product - a phone plan, a video ad, a checking account - becomes almost interchangeable. The mechanism is the constant.
02 · THE RANGEConsulting, craft, and scale
The early chapters built range on purpose. Bulbul launched consumer offers for Telecom Italia Mobile in Turkey, standing up the marketing development and offers functions for a brand-new business and managing the team that shaped its programs. From there he moved to New York and into two very different schools of thought at once.
At McKinsey & Company, he worked on digital marketing strategy and the digital transformation of major brands - the rigor side, where a recommendation lives or dies on the strength of its logic. At Ogilvy & Mather, he led brand and marketing strategy for Fortune 100 companies - the craft side, where the same logic has to become something a person actually wants to look at. Strategy and story, learned back to back.
- First movesTelecom Italia Mobile — TurkeyBuilt marketing development and offers for a new business.
- New YorkMcKinsey & CompanyDigital marketing strategy and transformation for top brands.
- New YorkOgilvy & MatherBrand strategy for Fortune 100 companies.
- ~9 yearsGoogle / YouTubeStrategy & analytics, ads marketing, then YouTube Shopping.
- Retail mediaWalmart ConnectSenior Director, Brand & Enterprise Marketing.
- NowSantander US & OpenbankChief Marketing Officer.
03 · THE SCALENine years inside YouTube
Then came Google, where Bulbul spent close to a decade almost entirely inside YouTube marketing. He held three distinct senior roles there, and read together they trace a full arc. First as Global Head of Strategy, Insights and Analytics for YouTube Marketing - the measurement seat, the one that suits a person who once tried to quantify emotion for a living. Then as Global Head of YouTube Ads Marketing, where the team oversaw more than a doubling of revenue. Finally as Head of Marketing for YouTube Shopping, where he built the marketing function from the ground up for viewers, creators, merchants, and brands all at once.
That last one is the tell. Building a function from zero is a different muscle than running one that exists. It means writing the first strategy, hiring the first people, and defending a budget for something no one can point to yet. He did it inside one of the most scrutinized products on the internet.
04 · THE PIVOTWhy a bank hired a video-ads veteran
After a turn at Walmart Connect as Senior Director of Brand & Enterprise Marketing - inside one of the fastest-growing retail-media businesses in the country - Bulbul crossed into financial services. On paper, banking looks like the opposite of YouTube. Banking sells trust, patience, and the promise of being boring in the ways that matter. YouTube sells attention measured in seconds.
That contrast is exactly the point. Santander runs a US bank serving millions of customers and, through Openbank, a digital-first bank meant to compete on speed and experience rather than branch count. Marketing a product like that means borrowing the attention mechanics of a platform and pointing them at something people are supposed to keep for decades. It is a job for someone who has lived on both sides of the trade.
05 · THE ARGUMENTAI promotes the marketer
In September 2025, at MoneyLIVE North America in Chicago, Bulbul sat for a fireside chat on how artificial intelligence is reshaping banking marketing. His framing there is worth borrowing whatever business you are in. He does not describe generative AI as the thing that replaces marketers. He describes it as the thing that changes their job title.
The shift, as he lays it out: use generative AI to produce on-brand content at speed, use AI-driven segmentation to personalize at a scale humans could never hand-craft, and move analytics from reading sentiment after the fact to predicting the next move before it happens. The result is a marketer who spends less time managing campaigns and more time orchestrating systems. Fewer hours on production, more on judgment. It is an optimistic read, and it comes from someone who has actually built the functions he is talking about.
06 · THE PERSONBrooklyn, a daughter, and a schnauzer
Away from the org charts, the details are smaller and more human. Bulbul has lived in Brooklyn with his daughter and a miniature schnauzer. He supports nonprofits focused on youth education and empowerment, and in 2024 joined Umbrex, a network of independent management consultants - the sort of move that suggests he still likes being close to the raw problem, not only the executive summary of it.
Put it all together and a pattern shows up that is easy to miss in a résumé. Bulbul keeps taking on a new kind of hard. Consulting hard, then agency hard, then platform-scale hard, then retail-media hard, and now trust-at-scale hard. The industries change. The through-line is a marketer who treats every product as another chance to answer the only question he ever really started with.