Head of Marketing: Hello! 👋

[Adrienne]

Hi everyone! I’m excited to be joining Pocket Network Foundation in the Head of Marketing Role.

I thought I’d kick things off by introducing myself here and by inviting you to share your thoughts and opinions with me about what you’d like to see from me and from Pocket’s marketing.

Who am I?

I’m Adrienne (or Adz). I spent a decade in brand & marketing strategy and global brand management (working with Unilever, Diageo, and others). I then spent the next decade building my own service businesses in Asia (built and exited 2). I have been in Web3 for the last couple of years, contributing mostly at Bankless DAO and ApeCoin DAO, but I’m a member of many more DAOs than I can stay on top of. I’ve held POKT for about a year.

I came into Web3 because of a set of ideals around decentralisation and economic empowerment. I’m tediously passionate about community-led brand building and believe my decade working on the global brand playbook evolves nicely into the new paradigm of headless brands. I’m a mum of 2. I’m Irish by birth, but I live in Portugal, I’m a nomad at heart, and I lost my accent a long time ago…

What will I be doing?

I hold myself responsible ultimately for business results.

That links back to the protocol revenue north star and my contribution will be via a set of marketing objectives and KPIs that I will share with you as they emerge.

But, in general, these are what I see as my key responsibilities:

• Acting as a steward of the brand and champion of our target audience(s).
• Developing and executing marketing activity that moves us closer to our BHAGs.
• Empowering and enabling community members to pick up and activate the brand.
• Tracking brand and marketing metrics for accountability and faster learning.

The first thing I’d like to work on is defining the brand strategy, fleshing out our target personas (so that everything we do is anchored in insight), and framing our narrative and messaging. This will all flow into visual identity and marketing plans.

I’d love to hear what you think. What are your priorities? What would you like to see from me?

How will I do it?

As openly and collaboratively as possible.

Whether you have experience in marketing or are simply curious about it, I’d love you to join in with brand definition sessions (and many more participatory workshops to come) that I will run in our Discord. I know that most people may not have time, and there is no expectation, but the doors are open.

I’ll also use async approaches like google docs that will be open for comment etc.

I’m always happy to chat with anyone who wants to talk about brand and marketing or find ways to get more involved. Here’s my calendly: https://calendly.com/adrienne_pokt/30min

Next Steps / CTA

I know there are strong opinions about what our marketing has been and what it could be. That is such a strength for Pocket and I would love to understand your thoughts, perspectives, and priorities if you’re prepared to share them with me.

=> Feel free to contact me on Discord or Telegram. I’ll be joining groups I’m not already part of over the next couple of days and dropping an intro into each of them so I’m easy to find. I’m ‘adrienne_adz’ on both.

=> I’ll be at the Community Call on Thursday 13th and would love to answer any questions or just hear your point of view. I’m sorry I can’t make the call on the 6th but it’s midnight my time and I don’t think I’d make a great first impression!

=> You’re welcome to drop some time into my calendar and we can have a 1:1 chat. https://calendly.com/adrienne_pokt/30min

Thanks for reading this far!

[Cryptocorn]

Hi Adz and welcome to the working side of Pocket!

Like any other community, we have those who are passionate, lots of intelligence and a few trolls for good measure.

It’s great to see someone take control and lead our marketing, which as you mention has occasionally suffered in the past.

What I’d really like to see is more concrete specifics around strategy and roadmap. Once we have our plan, who are we going to target? How are we going to target them? What’s our budget (where it can be shared)? What timeframe do we expect? Etc etc. No one likes imposing KPIs and defined pass/fail metrics on themselves, but a few specifics on a roadmap of what you’d like to achieve, when, would be really good to communicate to the community what’s being done and what’s expected in the next quarter etc.

Lots of luck on the path ahead!

[Adrienne]

Thank you, @Cryptocorn !

You’ll definitely see concrete specifics around strategy & roadmap. You can expect a detailed (and hopefully clear!) plan including who we’ll target, what change we’ll deliver through it (SMART), and how we’ll deliver that change (activities and channels). And metrics are key for learning.

I very much appreciate your commentary to date in the forum and really look forward to active dialogue!

Watch this space!

[Jerry (Sufyan Khan)]

Welcome to the Pocket Family, Adrienne.

We are really looking forward to seeing you in action.

[bruceyin]

Welcome onboard Adrienne!

[Jinx (Chris Jenkins)]

Welcome, Adz. Nice to meet you.

[Adrienne]

Thank you @Jinx, @bruceyin, and @Jerry .
Look forward to getting to know you over the coming months!

[msa6867]

Welcome Adrienne!

I’d love to see your review/analysis of POKT marketing efforts up until now and what you plan to bring to the table that is same/different, etc. Something like the following:

“What Pocket has done well up to now is X; we plan to continue and expand…”

What Pocket has done previously that was ineffective was X; the reason it was ineffective is Y, we plan to scrap this and instead focus on Z"

“The marketing budget in the past has been X; to do an effective job going forward calls for a budget of Y, which we expect to allocate doing X, Y and Z”

Separately, if you are willing, I’d love to hear one of your success stories - whether from one of the companies you worked for or from the decade you ran your own service business. It doesn’t have to be particularly relevant to Pockets current marketing needs, just something to help us get to know you a bit better and provide some insight into how you go about problem solving.

[h5law]

LFG

Amazing to see you joining PNF @Adrienne

Watch this space!

[Adrienne]

Thank you, @msa6867!

These are great questions.

My TL;DR on where we are today:

Pocket has a real strength in the community, the way POKTNews stepped up and provided great social content, that Poktopus Army organised around amplification, that Rit and Ethen revamped the website, the general quality of insight and accountability from members like yourself, CryptoCorn, Caeser, and many more. There will be other examples as I get fully up to speed - anything I’ve overlooked here won’t stay overlooked for long.

The DNA work sets a great foundation. The clarity and direction is important and feels compelling and exciting. The output is great but the way it was created is also a great testament to this project. It walked the walk on community involvement and emerged richer for the variety of perspectives and with no loss of clarity or focus.

The project in general has a fantastic heritage as a pioneer of decentralised infrastructure and has benefited from highly credible spokespeople that have formed connections across Web3 - both the obvious spokespeople, but also every member of the community that champions the project. This has brought fantastic partnership opportunities and I believe we’re just at the beginning of that.

I am deeply aware of these strengths and will continue to build on them.

My TL;DR or where we can improve:

I think our center of gravity has been too focused on the world of Pocket and I think we’ve veered towards complexity. I’m looking forward to enriching our understanding of our target audience and making sure that what we communicate is compelling to them. I’ve already started 1:1 interviews and am scoping out a larger piece of research that could yield much richer insight. More to follow.

As we ground ourselves in our target audience everything becomes simpler and that is key to being able to cut through in a noisy world. Our user journeys, our messaging, every touch point. We need to carry the DNA work into our externally focused comms. Into positioning and messaging that lives in the shared space between us and our audience. Messaging that is true, easy to understand, distinctive, and compelling to our particular audience.

We will develop and implement communications plans that map out what marketing needs to deliver, with what audience, and how we plan to deliver it (activities and channels). There will be clear marketing objectives linking back to our protocol revenue north star.

It’s too early to say exactly what these are but I suspect one of the first will focus on consideration among end user developers at established projects, to drive volume through gateways.

In the meantime…

We already have work in progress to drive positive media impressions and visibility at events. I’m also going to be working with POKTNews to iterate forwards with our Twitter, and I think there are improvements we can make pretty quickly on our website.

I’m also working on an accelerated campaign around wPOKT to support launch (targeted for late August).

My TL;DR on budgets:

There is a $100k budget currently allocated to marketing activity. There is also a community incentive budget that we may be able to tap into as we lean into empowering the community.

It would be wrong for me to say today how that money will be spent. Planning comes first.

But there will be no surprises.

My “success” story…

This would be a great moment to try to impress you with big brand names and big numbers.

But, instead I’m going to tell you what comes to mind when I ask myself what I’m most proud of.

When I was 30 years old I was on a leadership track in a company I loved. I stepped off that track, which took huge courage, to start an adventure.

I moved to Ulaanbaatar with my husband of 3 months. We invested our life savings to start a company together. We grew it in what felt like a crypto bull market. We knew we were officially in a bear market when we lost $150k overnight. We thought we had reduced our expenses to the bone, and then realised we could cut them in half again. That meant we protected our team.

After 3 years running the business we were able to remove ourselves from day to day operations because we had an amazing team that were equity holders. One of them came down to Singapore with us and owned equity in our second business too.

We faced threats. We trusted too much. We had a member of staff steal IT equipment and petty cash. We had someone else try to rip off our database. We were almost run onto the rocks by an expat mining executive who appeared to have taken a brown envelope from an international competitor.

But we also had an incredibly strong and fiercely loyal team.

And, as cliche as it sounds, we made a difference. When I happened to be on a podcast recently with a Mongolian, the first thing he said was “you guys improved so many lives”.

Big international brands came into the market with classic swagger, thinking they would dominate effortlessly. But we retained market leadership. Because we made a brand promise and we lived up to it in everything that we did.

The fact that we sold the business seems to be what impresses most people.

But the stuff I shared just now is what I’m most proud of.

With me you can expect someone who has the training and pedigree of the best marketing teams on the planet. But I left the ivory tower a long time ago. I’m pragmatic. You can expect me to act with high integrity. I have very little ego and a strong bias to learning.

And I am incredibly excited to be joining this amazing community at what feels like an incredible time.

I’ll work my arse off to deliver results for Pocket.

[Igboze (Igboze Israel)]

Hello!
It’s great having you to drive things forward. Warm welcome into the ecosystem.

Given the scope of things you will be covering, where does the recently started Regional Hubs programme lie and what are your plans for it?

It will be helpful to get your insights as you are driven to achieve mass adoption.

Thank you!

[Adrienne]

Thank you @Igboze!

I would love to chat.

Do you want to drop me a dm? I’m adrienne_adz on both TG and Discord.

Or feel free to just drop time straight in for a call?

Adz

[Igboze (Igboze Israel)]

Hello!
I booked a call on your calendar if that is okay. I can still DM though

[Adrienne]

Looking forward to it!