[00:00:00] Intro: Marketers everywhere are getting creative. They’re being asked to do more with less, and they are rising to the challenge. In this new season of the Brave Marketer Podcast, we are exploring advertising in a brave new world, the challenge and the opportunity of changing consumer preferences within a volatile economy hosted by brave software.

[00:00:25] The makers of the privacy respecting browser with a built-in ads platform that rewards users for their attention with the basic attention token. You’re listening to a new episode of the Brave Marketer Podcast. We are back with season seven, and we’re so excited to be back in your ears again. This episode features Jennifer Catula, who is the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Polygon.

[00:00:52] Jennifer oversees all aspects of their marketing, brand, community, pr, digital, and. She’s a [00:01:00] marketing executive with over 20 years of experience at Explosive Growth Web two and Web three organizations, and she’s passionate about the infinite positive impact that Web three will have for people, communities, businesses around the world.

[00:01:15] You’re gonna love this first episode of the New Season because we discussed marketing in a downturn and getting scrappy with emerging technologies like. We also talked about what Web two and Web three marketers can learn from each other, along with how to find and target the right communities based on who you’re serving.

[00:01:36] Now before we hop into today’s episode, we wanna highlight our brave pick of the week. Every episode we choose a brand that has run an ad campaign with Brave, and this week it’s Swarovski. Swarovski has run push notifications on brave, utilizing our verified ad conversions mechanism to measure the value of purchases driven by our ads during Black Friday and the Christmas [00:02:00] shopping period.

[00:02:01] Right now Swarovski is testing out our recently launched search ads. Now with no further ado, here is this week’s episode of The Brave Marketer.

[00:02:10] Donny: Jennifer, welcome to the Brave Marketer Podcast. How are you doing today?

[00:02:17] Jennifer: I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me, Donnie.

[00:02:20] Donny: Yeah, we’re so excited to have you on.

[00:02:22] This is our season seven kickoff. Why don’t we just jump into it? And so for those that don’t know Polygon Labs, can you give us just a general

[00:02:30] Jennifer: overview? Yeah, of course. So Polygon Labs, we are the development and growth team for the Polygon protocols. We develop Ethereum, scaling Solutions, blockchain solutions.

[00:02:41] We have a lot of different solutions out there and we’ve been around since 2017.

[00:02:45] Donny: That’s great. Can you give some of the examples of the projects that are running on the platform?

[00:02:51] Jennifer: Oh my gosh. I think we have like tens of thousands of different projects on Polygon. But you’ve probably heard of many [00:03:00] big names that are building on Polygon, like Reddit or Starbucks.

[00:03:03] Nike as an example. We have a lot of games. Last week we just announced that one of the biggest game developers in Korea is building on Polygon NFTs today. The Utes N F T project started to bridge over to Polygon, so it’s really exciting. There’s probably all categories. Defi is really big. We have Ave and Curve on Polygon Unis swap.

[00:03:25] That’s probably a good array of different categories in developers that are building on Polygon. And

[00:03:32] Donny: why do projects choose Polygon over other layer twos?

[00:03:37] Jennifer: Polygon has seen just massive growth over the last year, and it’s been really great to see. For the most part, it’s because of one, the technology, it’s fast, it’s cheap compared to Ethereum, and number two is because of the ecosystem.

[00:03:52] So we. You should think about it, kind of like a flywheel. The more developers that come to it, they’re building on solidity. It’s a [00:04:00] relatively straightforward language to use. It’s kind of like JavaScript. So the more developers that you can get on building, then the more depth that are built, and then.

[00:04:09] The more ecosystem projects, solutions providers. Tool providers. So the ecosystem just grows and I think that’s what kind of makes Polygon really sticky for developers and brings more developers to the platform.

[00:04:21] Donny: That’s great. And is there a way to measure developer or network growth?

[00:04:26] Jennifer: We look at a lot of metrics, so I wouldn’t have those off the top of my head, but things like N F T sales volume, defi, sales volume, T V L of the chain, those are some of the metrics we look at.

[00:04:39] Obviously, we look at it from like a pretty segmented perspective so that we can track how things are doing over time for particular segment.

[00:04:48] Donny: And how has it been? Obviously we were like in a crypto winter. Hopefully we’re coming out of that. How has it been the past year or so?

[00:04:56] Jennifer: You know, the last summer and through the fall, it just [00:05:00] felt like we were doing announcement after announcement and we were, it was really great to see how many builders were kind of coming onto the platform.

[00:05:08] I think after sort of. Slowed down towards the end of the year. What we’re seeing is like this contraction. So it’s really about web three projects and nurturing those developers that are still here. And I know for me as a marketer, like. We, like many other companies in this space have reduced our staff.

[00:05:30] And so we’re trying to figure out lots of different creative ways to still have as much impact as we can while we’re in this bear market and while we’re trying to continue to grow. And I think like if you’re in web three, you’re really. Trying to bring this to the masses, like we all are here for the same reason, so we all wanna get through it, continue to nurture the great creativity and projects that are still building and still in this space.

[00:05:55] Donny: What’s the most exciting thing you’re working on right

[00:05:57] Jennifer: now? There’s two really big things. So last week [00:06:00] we were at Polygon Labs, was at G D C. And it was my first time at G D C, but we had a huge presence. We announced a couple of really cool partnerships, one with Immutable. you may have heard or seen that Immutable is another gaming company and they are building on the Polygon blockchain technology.

[00:06:18] They have a gaming platform, like a gaming engine. So it’s kind of this like very symbiotic relationship. We’re really excited to see how that will accelerate the growth of developers and users, for blockchain gaming. We also, like I said, announced Exxon, one of our Korea partners, and we just had a huge presence there.

[00:06:37] So it’s really awesome to see that blockchain gaming is starting to come into its own. We were able to show like 12 different. Playable demos in our booth, which is really exciting cuz these games take a long time to develop. So that’s the first one. And then the second one is, we launched Polygon Z K E VM yesterday.

[00:06:56] And this was just a monumental [00:07:00] feat. I think, you know our, technology teams. Basically made history to get this out. It’s fully E V M equivalent. It’s fully open sourced. It’s secured by Ethereum, and we’re just seeing like just so much excitement around it. We brought on a ton of solution providers to make sure that DAPs can deploy right away.

[00:07:21] When the chain launched and, we got just a lot of great accolades and press, Vitalik did the first transaction when we went live. Mm-hmm. Which is really, really cool. That’s so cool. Yeah. Like the teams are really proud of it. And I think this kind of ZK technology, zero knowledge technology, if you’re not familiar with it, is they were saying they, the proverbial, they were saying this would be take five to 10 years to develop and the ZK teams on, on the polygon lab.

[00:07:49] We’re able to do it in about less than a year. So it’s just incredible what they’ve achieved.

[00:07:54] Donny: Wow, that’s absolutely amazing. So this podcast is all about your brave marketing moment, like a time when you’ve [00:08:00] took in a risk in your career. Can you give an example of one of those?

[00:08:03] Jennifer: Absolutely. So I was thinking about this and I have a lot of like career related risks that I know.

[00:08:09] We wanted to talk about marketing related risks, so we can talk about the career ones in another time. But when I started at Polygon Labs last year, one of the things that I noticed is that we had been growing so fast, so quickly and had really been positioning Polygon. This Ethereum scaling solution, which we are, but that we were starting to garner the attention of the Starbucks, of the Reddits of these big brands.

[00:08:36] And what I realized is that our positioning in our brand didn’t match what we were achieving in the market and where we really wanted to go. So my brave marketing moment is really about this journey of. Rebranding Polygon Labs into what it is today, I wouldn’t say it’s been a full rebrand, like a lot of people think about.

[00:08:57] A rebrand is like a full rename [00:09:00] or like a brand new visual identity or logo, and it was parts of that, but a lot of it was really honing in and articulating who is our audience. So it’s obviously developers, first and foremost, so important, but developers span the gamut. Like have web three developers, you have web two developers, you have big enterprises, and so we needed to be able to speak the language.

[00:09:22] Web three developers, but we also needed to have the polish for web two companies to be taken seriously. And so that’s a big challenge cuz you have like this huge span in audience. So it started really with like a lot of those web two marketing tactics of like, who is our audience, what are the insights, what do we know about them?

[00:09:40] then defining what we stood for. You know, we’re a web three company, we’re built on Ethereum. For decentralized, our vision one day is to like give this all out to the community and have polygon, the protocols kind of run on their own. And so when I think about bringing those values in those real web three values of [00:10:00] decentralization of self sovereignty, we had to pull all that together to articulate.

[00:10:05] That, what is our ethos and then what is our value proposition? So where is our technology going? What do we offer today? What is our journey and what are we gonna offer to developers long term? how are we gonna solve some of these big technical challenges so that projects can build really awesome experiences and deliver on that web three vision to.

[00:10:25] Audiences and their communities. And then all of that kind of culminates in how do you show up and how are you showing up? And when I looked from a competitive perspective, it was very, very clear, very quickly that all the blockchains, all the protocols, were all playing this really narrow space.

[00:10:42] We all use the same language, even the visual identity. If you go to any sort of major layer. It all looks very, very similar, right? And we use a lot of the same language, fast, cheap. All of our benefits are almost all the same. to me, I thought, if we’re gonna take web three [00:11:00] from,, thousands of gaps and millions of users to millions of adapts and billions of users, we have to find a way to resonate with more people.

[00:11:09] And so that kind of took us on a journey of. Rebranding visually how we communicate, what we sort of the brand architecture, the brand hierarchy. Over the last several months we’ve started to articulate our values. we’ve relaunched our website. The big part of that is really putting our community and putting our partners first.

[00:11:30] so if you looked at our old website, which is not live anymore, you would see like all this technology, which is awesome cuz the technology really is what makes it happen. But we were never showcasing the inspiration of what that technology can help you achieve. And so now you know, we’re really starting with like, what can you do with this blockchain technology and how is the blockchain technology that we have superior to anything else that you can do?

[00:11:57] And how does that achieve those new use cases [00:12:00] and new desires that you have as a project or a brand or Whatever it is that you wanna build. It’s definitely a journey. We moved super, super fast. So it was not like we had this moment of a brand relaunch. Even the logo, it’s like a double hexagon logo and it was facing to the left and we flipped it to face to the right.

[00:12:18] So now you can get this like vision of the P of Polygon inside that Double Hexagon logo, which I think is a really. Connection point to Polygon the name. And over time what we’re going to do is we’re a decentralized protocol. So we will eventually sort of start to figure out how do we decentralize our brand?

[00:12:36] So what do we wanna like, make sure is really, really super consistent, but then how do we let our community take part in the brand and be part of this community to own it on their own? And so I’m really excited for that next phase of kind of like brand decentralization, which is something. If you’re coming from a brand or coming from web two, you don’t do it all.

[00:12:58] you have on lockdown. [00:13:00] Brand is always on lockdown, and in most companies you have like a brand board that will review how your brand is used by anyone else. But I think we’re taking a different approach because we want to make sure our community can get and extract as much value as from the protocol, from the brand, from Polygon as possible.

[00:13:16] So that’s like the next phase of our journey from a like a brand and marketing perspective. And for me, like not working in web three that long, it’s very different from. Where I was before working with big brands, working at Meta for a really long time, and so I’m just really excited about it and I think we’ve made a lot of progress so far and I think we actually are now delivering on that original intent of being able to speak to the web three developer and speak to the big brand and resonate with.

[00:13:47] Donny: That’s great. Yeah. So a lot of the marketing stuff that you’ve talked about is more like internal things that you’ve like, changed the logo, changed the website. What does the marketing look like moving out to like the developers to [00:14:00] users I guess more on the media side or social media side, how do you

[00:14:04] Jennifer: get out there?

[00:14:04] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I would say that I didn’t talk about that at all, but that’s a big part of it. So, you know, making sure that we have social channels for various audiences, whether it’s a developer, a gaming audience, a defi audience, an N F T audience. So we have started to establish those.

[00:14:23] Built consistency around our voice and our communications through those. And then campaigns. So, you know, recently leading into G D C, we worked on what we’ve called the Game On Campaign and similarly to how we presented our partners first in the website. The same thing for The Game On Campaign.

[00:14:44] We put our partners first. And showcased their capabilities throughout the month of March leading into G D C. And that’s, to me, like that is part of the value of being part of the polygon ecosystem, is that you not only can sort of piggyback on some of these [00:15:00] bigger things that are happening, you can get synergies and relationships built with other members of the ecosystem.

[00:15:07] So it could be another gaming developer or a tool provider. Or an implementation partner that’s all working in, in sort of the same space as you. I look at Polygon as like the sort of foundational layer to help make that possible and help them succeed and help them deriv value from that.

[00:15:26] Donny: Yeah. Have you had to change a lot of stuff over the past year since, like the market tip?

[00:15:30] Like what, what would everything that you’re doing now, like marketing wise have been different if we were still in the bull market?

[00:15:37] Jennifer: So we had to reduce our staff, and that’s been really challenging. And there’s a few things I would say that we’ve started to do a little bit differently. One is we’re starting to use AI a lot more and it’s really fun, like for the whole team that’s using it.

[00:15:52] I would say now that we have pretty clear brand guidelines, we can use mid journey or image creator [00:16:00] tools, and that sort of empowers the entire team to be creative. It also empowers the entire team if you’re gonna use like chat G B T to start generating content, at least the base, like a starting point to be able to do more routine work and do it more quickly.

[00:16:16] So we’ve actually not had to reduce a ton of the output. We’re just changing how we do things so that we can still maintain like the quality and not quite the same amount of volume, but the quality for sure. And then on the other hand, we go to events all the time, so we’ve had to change how many events we go to.

[00:16:36] Our approach at those events. I think, you know, last year we were showing up big at many of these events, like dozens and dozens. I think Polygon Labs is at last year and this year it’s like a dozen, something like that, official events that we’re gonna be a part of. So the approach has changed. we’re working, we’re bringing our partners in and collaborating with them so that together [00:17:00] we can do more maybe with a reduced budget or what have you.

[00:17:03] And I think it works well for everyone. You know, we can kind of play to all of our strengths and, have the same amount of impact.

[00:17:09] Donny: Yeah, that, great. So how do you measure, like, so you’re doing all these different things both internally and externally, and how are you measuring success across the different marketing and media channels that you’re running in?

[00:17:22] Jennifer: Definitely. So we don’t do any paid advertising right now. Everything we do is press social, and then campaign work. And it’s interesting I would say we’re learning here because we have a really big social presence. And then what we’re doing is we’re sort of building our on chain presence from a marketing perspective and building, I guess what you would call like the web three funnel.

[00:17:48] If you think about big, broad awareness, it could be press, it could be. You know, something we share in social and then how do we get those developers to then take action so the action [00:18:00] could be engagement. So I’ll go back to the Game on Campaign and say part of that engagement was to get the developers to claim an on chain achievement token.

[00:18:09] And so now we have those wallet addresses. We can potentially connect those to any sort of like an actual lead from into our system so that we can help them onboard should they want to onboard. If they don’t wanna onboard, they can be part of our community and we can use that information. With partners to potentially airdrop NFTs or have a partner airdrop NFTs.

[00:18:32] So there’s a lot of things that we can do to continue to nurture those relationships. Yesterday, with the Z K E V M launch, we gave out a so bound token commemorative N F T to anyone that wanted to mint it. And once we have those so bound NFTs, they can mint for about seven days Now for, you know, something for example we could do with that is, take that so bound, N F T.

[00:18:56] And anyone who is bridged to Z K E V M, we can then air chop [00:19:00] something to them. So there’s a lot of things we can do that are really creative. And then from like an measurement and attribution perspective, we are looking at the entire funnel. For one of our campaigns, we partnered with a company called Spindle who does on chain attribution.

[00:19:13] Really interesting stuff. Worked with somebody that I used to work with at Meta. Who is the founder of the company? Antonio Garcia Martinez. You know, I think attribution and measurement is like totally changing with the death of the cookie. So every marketer is gonna have to figure out like, how do you actually, you know, take the marketing that you’re doing and connect it to.

[00:19:33] Real world results. Now, Polyon Labs is not, you know, we’re not generating revenue. So what we’re looking for really is how many developers are we getting in to be successful and to build DAPs and their DAPs are successful. So that’s really what we want to see at the end of the day.

[00:19:50] Donny: Yeah. So you’re not doing a lot of paid media, so I think that the appreciation of the cookie is like less relevant to you, but it sounds like it is relevant.

[00:19:58] So how. Is the [00:20:00] cookie still relevant for you?

[00:20:02] Jennifer: Well, the cookie is really not relevant for us right now, but I think like for a general marketer, you’re thinking about measurement, you’re using cookies. But for us, we’re really trying to look at sort of the on chain.

[00:20:14] We’re basically saying like our. Awareness is happening on Twitter and we can connect some of those Twitter posts potentially to on chain activity and see what the connection points are and what the funnel looks like. Yeah.

[00:20:29] Donny: Now just to have fun with it, like if you did have like a hundred million dollar media budget, where would you spend it?

[00:20:37] What would you do with it?

[00:20:38] Jennifer: Oh, that’s such a good question, Donnie. I don’t know if I can like answer that off the cuff.

[00:20:43] Donny: Well, I mean, if you think about your different audiences, right? Like, so you have your developer audiences, like how would you market to the developers? How would you market to, I guess other companies, but I guess that is developers building a polygon.

[00:20:56] And then so like is there any type of B2C [00:21:00] element of polygon too that you need like the consumers to be aware

[00:21:02] Jennifer: of? Yeah, we’re not super focused on like, retail investors, but when I think about developers, I don’t know if it would be an advertising budget per se, more so than a budget to get more developers.

[00:21:17] In sticky in the system. So that could look like really sticky educational programs. And I’m thinking about like some of these developers are like 13 to 18 years old, like the web three developers. So how do you create like really sticky education programs and get them into the polygon ecosystem and start showing them value?

[00:21:37] So it’s probably partially education, some form of gamification to help nurture them and keep them here. And help them create value so that they come back and continue to build. So I like, I don’t know if it would be a traditional media budget, because I don’t know if I’m gonna find them in some of the traditional media places that you might really think of like a, a [00:22:00] Facebook or a Google or an Instagram.

[00:22:02] It could be like deep in discords or telegrams, and that’s not where you’re gonna really spend money. So it’s probably thinking about like, How do you get them and then get them in in a really sticky way. So there’s bit different than a media budget.

[00:22:16] Donny: Yeah, I completely hear you.

[00:22:18] That that does make sense. It’s like even if you had all this like media dollars, like it’s like you wouldn’t really spend it a lot because you’re reaching like a totally different audience.

[00:22:26] Jennifer: Yeah. And it just blows my mind that so many developers are so, so young, like, I can’t, can’t even say early career.

[00:22:34] They’re not even in their career yet. It’s like they’re pre-care, but they have one. And it’s just, it’s wild to me. So

[00:22:40] Donny: you came from like a, you came from Meta, you came from like a traditional web two marketer. And then how are things changed, like when you went over to Web three and like what can Web three marketers learn from web two traditional marketers?

[00:22:54] Like kind of going both ways?

[00:22:56] Jennifer: Yeah. This has been the thing that I want [00:23:00] to. Be able to articulate really, really well because it’s like coming into Web three. The biggest thing that I’ve learned is this concept of community and the idea of like, of growing your community from a very engaged nucleus to something much bigger.

[00:23:19] And Web two marketers traditionally will look at things as like, I’m gonna look at it from a 50,000 foot view. I’m gonna segment. And I’m going to do this like targeting to reach my audience and, go from there. I think we’re all really familiar with that. So what I think Web three marketers can learn from Web two marketers is some of just the basics of things like customer insight.

[00:23:44] So like if you’re gonna build a community, define what that community is and. Articulate what they care about and create that community around the things that they care about. And obviously it can grow and change, and I think that’s the beauty of Web three is [00:24:00] that. Things can evolve so quickly and they can evolve.

[00:24:04] They’re almost like living, breathing things. And when you’re in web two, you’re oftentimes doing surveys every three to six months, or customer in research every three to six months. And so you don’t have that quick twitch on your. Audience. So I think it kind of goes both ways. Like, yes, you should be doing that, you should be doing the customer insights in web three.

[00:24:26] But what web two marketers can learn is like that quick pulse. And then the other thing that I think is really interesting is like just the concept of product market fit. Like who is your audience and what are you building for them and do they match? And so I think there’s a lot of really cool ideas that.

[00:24:44] People are building, but then that could be a absent a community or absent insights about that community. I think it’s just indicative of like early phase technology where people are tinkering around with things and seeing what’s [00:25:00] possible without like an actual audience to serve. It reminds me of early days at when I was at Facebook, when we launched the API platform.

[00:25:10] People were building all these like games and or like, you know, what is your favorite number? What’s your favorite color? And you would like get some results. And they were viral for like a few days and then they would just die off. And so there’s a lot of that experimentation happening. And I think we’re gonna start to see really interesting strong use cases.

[00:25:31] And we already are things like loyalty and defi. That will have a ton of stickiness and already have product market fit. But I think those two things, and I think that’s what both web two and web three marketers can learn from each other.

[00:25:46] Donny: Yeah, like it kind of was making me think like if you were a brand new project and you were trying to start a community from scratch, like you’d figure out the product market fit, you’d figure out who your community is, then how do you then [00:26:00] like build the community?

[00:26:01] Like where would you even go to find and build a brand new community?

[00:26:05] Jennifer: Yeah, it’s a good question. I actually wonder if that’s even the right order. Like, is the order that you know what your product is already and you wanna find the audience? Or is it that you know who your audience is and you wanna talk to them first?

[00:26:19] I’ve talked to people who have said it’s both ways, and I think you can go find them wherever they are. I am a mom of two young kids. Like my community doesn’t hang out on Twitter, so I’m gonna probably go to Instagram or something like that and maybe find my community, maybe even local. It could be a local community that you start and you start to ask those questions and nurture and figure out what they need or what they want and not worry about going mass right out of the gate.

[00:26:48] It’s about like understanding who, the people you are. Serving what they need, what they want, what they care about, and then building from there. We probably hang out on Twitter all the time, but I don’t think [00:27:00] all communities live on Twitter. But in web three it’s a very, it’s where we all are. Yeah.

[00:27:06] Donny: I find that like, it depends on what it is.

[00:27:08] Like there’s, communities on Facebook or even Facebook Messenger groups and there’s communities. Reddit, you know, answering certain questions. Mm-hmm. And it’s really dependent on like the category and what you’re talking about. It’s obviously different in, crypto. I feel like the crypto genesis was like on Twitter, but then it’s like telegram, then it’s discord.

[00:27:28] Yeah. And it’s like it just goes on and on and on. Depending on the project, depending on the level of privacy. Couldn’t signal, you know, whatever it is. Oh yeah. There’s so many. And it’s hard to keep track of all of them cuz you have all these little pockets of communities and you’re like, oh, I can’t focus on all these at the same time.

[00:27:45] Exactly. And it’s not like there’s like some Hootsuite product where you can just like message them like all, like they’re all pro private.

[00:27:52] Jennifer: Yeah, and we’re not there yet on mass adoption of blockchain where you can like drop something in their wallet either because [00:28:00] people are self selecting into web web three right now for the most part.

[00:28:03] It’s super interesting and it also seems a lot more fragmented that it even was two or three years ago where people are spending their time.

[00:28:11] Donny: Got it. Well, Jennifer, this has been an amazing interview. How can our users get in touch

[00:28:14] Jennifer: with you? Well, I’m Jay Catula everywhere. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram.

[00:28:21] Donny: Great.

[00:28:21] And can you nominate another, marketer for the Brave Marketer podcast?

[00:28:26] Jennifer: Yes. So I had the chance to meet a really awesome guy through the immutable partnership that we did with Polygon Labs. He’s the C of Immutable, and his name is Devin Farrera.

[00:28:38] Donny: Great. We will reach out to him. Well, thank you so much.

[00:28:41] Fabulous, Jennifer, for being on the podcast. Any last words for the listeners? Thank

[00:28:44] Jennifer: you so much for doing this. This is just a ton of fun and we have a lot to all collectively learn in this space.

[00:28:51] Donny: Yeah, there’s always tons of learning to be had, for sure. Yeah. Well,

[00:28:55] Jennifer: thank you so much. Thank you, Donnie.

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