MarTech Edge Interview with Bartosz Bielecki, Chief Marketing Officer, Zeropark

Welcome, Bartosz! You worked your way up from being a content marketer to serving as the CMO at Zeropark. Please share with us the backstory of this incredible journey.

Thank you for having me! I was hired by Commerce Media Tech (then Codewise) back in 2017 to take care of organic marketing activities for one of its key products – Zeropark. I had a background in developing content marketing at a couple of tech startups, and Zeropark had ambitions of launching a blog to drive organic audiences. Before I joined, the marketing strategy was pretty much limited to appearances at industry shows. My first month into the new job – the person who hired me and was overseeing marketing for Zeropark left the company to take on a VP of Marketing role elsewhere, putting me on the spot to lead all Zeropark marketing efforts. After successfully launching the blog, I got a chance to build my own content team and gradually step into other areas of marketing that were overlooked before. So, on top of the content team, over time, I’ve expanded the marketing team to cover more areas, like partnerships, product marketing, events, branding, lead gen, and lifecycle marketing. All those efforts supported the growth of Zeropark and our entire company, leading up to its acquisition by Team Internet Group (then CentralNic Group), a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange. Having solidified myself as an effective marketing leader, I was eventually promoted to the CMO position, which also covered some other products from the online marketing part of the group. Today, I’m in charge of marketing and business development teams for the performance marketing division at Team Internet Group.

According to you, what are the significant developments in the consumer market, and to what extent does commerce media play a key role in driving these developments?

The way consumers shop online has changed dramatically over the past few years. There are many new platforms consumers go to to look up products, for example, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platforms. Google is no longer the only place to be when it comes to swaying consumers your way. People tend to look for products directly where they can buy them, finance them, or save some money on them - so marketplaces, BNPLs, or even coupon sites. With the abundance of platforms, brand experiences are much more disconnected and fragmented than they used to be. It’s posing a challenge for marketers to stay on top of their funnels and sustain a cost-effective advertising strategy. Commerce media is here to address that problem. It’s all advertising that’s strategically placed to drive new sales to brands while making it clear where in the funnel a given consumer is – from the exploration stage (search advertising), through evaluation (ads on price or product comparison sites), to purchase (retail media, ads on coupon sites or BNPLs). Commerce media enables marketers to stay relevant and catch up with consumer trends while ensuring their advertising spend remains effective, as the ads are shown where the real purchasing decisions happen.

How does Zeropark serve as an all-in-one commerce media platform for global brands, seamlessly integrating performance marketing and advertising technology?

Zeropark is a commerce media network that enables brands to drive incremental sales. We work with publishers that bring us high-intent consumers and are incremental to most brands’ traditional marketing playbook (think Google or Meta). We have direct deals with companies like Klarna or Don’tPayFull to cover the bottom of the funnel and ensure that brands working with us see conversion rates that often go beyond 3-4x of what they get with their “traditional” advertising channels. We also cooperate with publishers like Microsoft, Yahoo!, or Opera to offer their most converting ad placements to our clients.

Additionally, another product of Commerce Media Tech, Voluum, brings our clients a state-of-the-art ad tracking solution to further ensure their large ad investments are well-optimized and as cost-effective as they get.

How do you tailor marketing strategies for distinct brands such as Zeropark, NewProgrammatic, Voluum, and Adrenalads within the Commerce Media Tech portfolio?

We’ve recently decided to rebrand from Codewise to Commerce Media Tech (we’re also using this name for the entire performance division of the Team Internet Group), and there’s a reason for it. We want to unify all our brands’ strategies to double down on the commerce media market. Zeropark and NewProgrammatic (our media buying agency) were the first to get their feet wet in that market, and now we want other brands to follow. There’s still a lot to learn, pretty much for every player, as the market is still quite new.

Our marketing strategy is designed to get our business development representatives right in front of retail brands and agencies, as well as affiliate networks. Be it trade shows, inbound content marketing actions, or lead generation through partners – our goal is to sign high-value IOs with the world’s biggest brands, and this requires our day-to-day marketing to focus on sales enablement rather than driving sales on its own.

How uniquely have you spearheaded the marketing initiatives at Zeropark, contributing to its consistent acknowledgment in the FT1000 Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies?

Above all, these accolades are a result of the incredible drive and agility of all teams and Commerce Media Tech. We’re quick on our feet when it comes to making adjustments to the strategy when we see a need, and thanks to the in-house development teams, we can bring products to the market fast. Marketing’s role in that is to observe the market trends and apply strategy changes as we go. We’re testing a lot; for example, we’ve adjusted our sales pitch multiple times this year. If we fail, we fail fast, learn our lessons, and improve.

How do you plan to further solidify Zeropark’s market position in the rapidly expanding performance marketing industry in the next five years?

2023 was the first year for Zeropark, where we fully focused on commerce media. We’ve already made some adjustments in our sales strategy for 2024 based on the intel we’ve collected over this year. We’ll double down on our partnership marketing tactics to get more advertisers on board and prove our incremental value to them. We’ll continue improving the experience our publishers get, with the goal of providing the most seamless integration on the market. We’ll also start building brand awareness of Commerce Media Tech itself on the road to securing the reputation of one of the market’s key players.

Given the versatility of your roles and responsibilities, how do you consistently ensure peak performance and deliver your best across various aspects of your work?

I think there are two main aspects to be considered here:

First, delegation. It still can get overwhelming at times, but the more you develop your team leaders, the more confidently you can delegate things to them. I spent a couple of years working very closely with my direct reports to ensure some things don’t need to go through me anymore, giving me time to deliver my best where I’m needed most.

Second, constantly looking for new challenges and getting outside of my comfort zone. Early in the year, I took the opportunity to take over the Business Development and Key Account teams. Since then, I’ve been learning something new about our business almost every day, giving me new ideas to get excited about and work on.