In our new column, we will occasionally host leading people in the digital industry, and ask them to answer both professional and personal questions. The goal of this column is to provide a platform and space for leading figures in the digital community so they can share their knowledge and experience with others.
And this time in the A-List spotlight – Yan (Yanko) Kotliarsky!
How did you start your career?
I divide the “start of my career” into two parts: the first part is entering the digital advertising world, and the second part is expanding into the brand and marketing world. I entered the first part around 2010. I started getting interested in how Facebook works as a platform, joined one of the first groups in the field, and helped people who were starting out on the platform (I still do that today). I got a job at one of the first digital agencies in Israel, and the rest is history. I started the second part of my career a few years ago when I began exploring how brands are born, and that in turn led me to study strategy and marketing, and today I work in, lecture on, and consult on the subject.
What were your first steps in the industry?
Constant exploration. I think this is an important trait for anyone who loves what they do. Professionalism is not a degree (although it doesn’t hurt), but continuous experimentation and learning in the field. And that’s how I started – I taught myself Facebook’s advertising system (there was no one to teach back then) and learned the world of marketing and strategy.
Tell us about your current role
In my current role, I work on demand generation for the startup where I work as part of the company’s growth process.
What do you like most about what you do?
In a startup, almost every role touches many areas. I love that our team does a wide variety of activities and we get to deal with many fields. But of course, I love the marketing work the most.
What are your challenges in your current role?
The biggest challenge is generating demand in a relatively new and not “sexy” category. Our biggest challenge is how to get business owners interested in making their websites accessible to people with disabilities.
Which main platforms do you recommend using?
I recommend that an advertiser gain a clear understanding of the audience they are supposed to advertise to and the goals they need to achieve, and from that derive the platforms where it is best to advertise to the audience to reach those goals.
What do you think is the next big thing in digital marketing?
I have no idea. I prefer to focus on what exists, not on what will happen 😊
What does your day-to-day work look like?
It really depends on the projects being worked on. Because the work is at a startup, new projects pop up almost every day. There are routine things like reviewing advertising channels, revenues, tracking customer acquisition costs, and the rest of the day is very project-dependent.
What was the marketing move you made that kept you up for a few nights?
I think launching a new website is always something that makes your heart skip a beat, and in the past year, we did such a move twice.
Tell us about a marketing / advertising move you are proud of?
We created a series of 45 videos of business owners who use our solution. It was a very large, complex project, everything was with clients in the US, and the result is insanely exciting. Today we use these videos to promote the solution and, perhaps no less importantly, to raise awareness of the need for website accessibility for people with disabilities.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in the digital world?
Understand that digital is part of the marketing mix and not something separate. Additionally, get to know the world of strategy. Start with the book “Good strategy / Bad strategy”.
Where do you draw inspiration from?
Advertising professional Dave Trott wrote a book called One + One = Three, in which he shows how inspiration comes from connecting different fields. That’s exactly how I operate. I get inspired by almost everything I see around me. I try to be interested in as many things as possible in life, explore different fields like physics, biology, history, art, astronomy, and more. When you are interested in more fields, you find more sources of inspiration.
How do you stay updated on what's new in the world and in general?
Honestly, to some extent I stopped keeping up with what’s new, and I’m mainly interested in the history of the advertising and marketing world and learning what doesn’t change.
Did you feel at any point in your career that you made a breakthrough?
No. I think my career is constantly building itself. I have goals I want to achieve, and the career is like a track I’m driving on. There are ups, there are downs, there are bumps, but everything leads forward.
What would you change in the field?
The obsession with tactics and falling in love with “what’s new”. A lot of people try to prove they know what will happen, where the world is heading (the marketing and advertising world), trying to find the next big thing instead of dealing with the here and now and what generates revenue for businesses today, not what might generate it tomorrow.
How do you summarize the past year?
For anyone who studies history, it’s clear that essentially there’s nothing particularly extraordinary. Meaning yes, there is a global pandemic, but the behavior around it is completely predictable given the fact that there have been pandemics in the past, and anyone who studied how humans behaved then won’t be surprised by how humans behave today. This is true in general and it’s also true for the world of marketing and advertising.
What was one of your biggest challenges during crisis periods?
Quickly resetting the organization’s tactics since our target audience, advertising and marketing agencies, was the audience hardest hit once the crisis began. We had to adapt tactics to reality to achieve our strategic goals.
Do you have new tools or activities that you credit to crisis periods? Without which you might not have survived?
There is an escalation of things like the shift to e-commerce, but even that is not yet as significant as people tend to think.
After a period of crisis - what should we take forward to maintain?
I think the main thing people and businesses need to adopt is the ability to stop and breathe. When acting out of panic, mistakes are usually made. It’s not simple at all, but it’s very important.
Tell us something personal about yourself that most people in the industry don't know
As of this writing, I am single (to Yan’s profile) 😉
Lecture by Yan Yanko Kotliarsky, Marketing Strategy in the Digital Era - at the Update Upgrade conference:
A bit about the interviewee
Yan (Yanko) Kotliarsky
Yan is Head of Demand at accessiBe, a marketing strategy consultant and lecturer in the digital age. Helping people and companies manage their digital marketing for over a decade, through research, strategy, and tactical actions required for a business to grow globally. Founder of the largest digital group in Israel – Digital Advertising Professionals
