Founder & GEO Strategy Director: Can Doğan

He founded Lein Digital in 2016.

At a time when digital marketing was not as widespread in Türkiye as it is today, Lein Digital, rather than focusing only on the Turkish market, began working on projects in different regions, above all Europe, America and the Middle East.

Rather than seeing digital marketing as simply running ads or managing social media, Doğan built his approach on treating it as a growth system in which technology, data, communication, sales and brand strategy work together.

In the years that followed, Lein Digital grew into an organization developing distinct areas of expertise in advertising technology, SEO, software, digital growth and artificial intelligence.

Founding the Yapay Zeka Firması (opens in a new tab) brand in 2019 was one of the important steps in Doğan’s long-term approach to artificial intelligence.

At the time, artificial intelligence did not yet have the broad commercial use it has today. But Doğan believed the technology would not stay limited to content generation or automation; he thought it would reshape many industries, from marketing to customer service and from search behavior to media.

This approach also laid the foundation for the new brands and products developed under the Lein Digital umbrella in the years that followed.

In 2023, focusing on the rise of AI-powered search systems, Doğan began working in the field of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

Foreseeing that, alongside classic search engine results, ChatGPT, Gemini and similar AI systems would change the way people reach information, he carried Lein Digital’s work into this new search ecosystem.

In the process, he worked to make the concept of GEO known in Türkiye and to bring it into use in the business world; Lein Digital, in turn, made the field one of its core areas of expertise.

Doğan’s approach here was not simply to continue existing SEO methods under a new name, but to develop a new visibility model built on brands being understood, referenced and recommended by AI systems.

Today Doğan leads the strategy of Lein Digital’s GEO agency practice; the Lein Digital blog has published more than 160 Turkish-language articles on GEO and SEO.

Over time, Lein Digital’s transformation went beyond being a service company.

Alongside agency services, Doğan began to focus on building software, AI products, media platforms, education ventures and new digital brands.

To this end, brands and ventures focusing on different fields were developed under the Lein Digital umbrella, such as Yapay Zeka Firması (opens in a new tab), İstanbul Reklam Ajansı (opens in a new tab), GEO Akademi (opens in a new tab), Sheltron (opens in a new tab), GEO Builder (opens in a new tab), House of Lein (opens in a new tab), AI Haber Ajansı and En İyi Yapay Zeka (opens in a new tab).

The core idea was not to create many brands unrelated to one another, but to build a digital ecosystem with different areas of expertise, driven by the same technology vision.

One of the areas Doğan focused on was applying artificial intelligence to real commercial problems rather than to theoretical use.

With AI-powered live support and voice assistant systems developed for the medical tourism industry, he carried out work on speeding up patient communication, sales processes and the customer experience.

As part of the Türkiye partnership of the US-based Doctours project, he also worked on developing medical tourism processes from the US to Türkiye and on new, technology-supported patient acquisition models.

This approach also sums up how Doğan sees artificial intelligence:

Technology creates value only when it solves a real problem.

Work on the use of artificial intelligence in the creative industries also accelerated during this period.

The AI-powered promotional video created for the Beyaz’la Joker project, aired on Kanal D, was positioned as one of the first AI video works broadcast on television in Türkiye.

Reaching more than 65 million views within its first 48 hours, and the award it received afterwards, made the project one of the works showing that AI production can reach wide audiences not only in the tech world but also in mainstream media.

Today, Can Doğan’s focus is on taking Lein Digital beyond a classic digital agency.

The goal is to grow brands working in artificial intelligence, technology, media, education, software and digital marketing under the Lein Digital umbrella and so to build one of Türkiye’s largest digital holdings and take it to global markets.

That is why the center of Lein Digital’s future strategy is not only the export of services, but the scaling of products, technologies and brands developed in Türkiye in the world market.

The future Doğan wondered about while learning to code in 2011 and the group he is building today are in fact connected by the same question:

How will technology change the way people and companies work a few years from now?

Lein Digital’s approach is built on not waiting for the answer to this question, but seeing it as early as possible and building products and companies on top of it.