@6e916b057f8140e2963375284 

Unbelievable. Polkadot needs marketing in order to compete with the bigger chains that have incredibly large marketing budgets. The reason that Polkadot has still some value instead of zero is because of the marketing that was done the problem is that not enough was done and we are trying to correct that

@Ivy 

Hi Ivy,

I will try to answer your questions in the same order:

1. What types of narratives are you seeking to drive over the next 3-4 months? Any detail on this would be incredibly helpful as we see many proposals for creating content and the messaging can be challenging for us to differentiate.
2. Positioning and messaging strategy - It would be great to hear how you believe this can be improved within Polkadot today.

Generally speaking, the way we see it, Polkadot has been a bit "too cool" and focused on tech ONLY rather than focusing on biz-dev plays that could support the ecosystem and actual marketing output - not only strategic docs and taglines, but actual media hits and hype/attention. 

That's kind of what we want to change by pushing different content marketing narratives as well as announcements, protocol updates, partnerships, anything that signals "bullish" that we can push out to the media and then down the funnel - ->  PR & media coverage - content marketing follow-ups (Polkadot vs. other protocols, Polkadot reviews, Polkadot in top XX listicles, polkadot ecosystem projects in top XX listicals, Op-eds about Polkadot) - social amplifications (Reddit, Twitter, Youtube) - then official community pushes (on Telegram, official X accounts etc).

I also think that some of the PR/content marketing budget should go to ecosystem projects to indicate the robustness of the Polkadot ecosystem, Polkadot will only be as big as the amount of projects building on Polkadot, which is very important to showcase that there’s developer action as well as biz-dev action from ecosystem projects - that we would be happy to pitch to the media and get more visibility to showcase the Polkadot ecosystem.

We will work on a general PR brief that will include all the information we’d like to use and suggest angles, narratives and storylines to support announcements, content marketing and thought leadership plays as well as set up an announcements schedule to pitch news to the media under embargo. We usually work with an official POC that can approve the brief and give us feedback until it’s perfected, this time and given the decentralized nature of this offering - we’d be happy to work with a few POCs from the foundation as well as the community to come up with the strategy and approve the narratives that we’d work on. The brief that we’d create could be used for any content that is being pushed around the Polkadot ecosystem by any content creator as it serves as a “top of the funnel” doc, so we can all be aligned on messaging/strategy and content creators could choose to use it as well.

Happy to already start talking strategy/narratives and work on a more detailed strategic plan, also happy to jump on a call to discuss that with you as well and have you as one of our POCs going forward.

Keep in mind, we’re a deliverables-based agency, there’s no retainer fee to working with us, meaning the budget is not gonna “run out” until we execute the amount of deliverables described in the proposal, so we can take some time with building the strategy and approving it with the team that we’d work with until we’re aligned and good to go. We will of course try to adhere to the timeline provided but if it’ll take more than 3-4 months, we will work until we’re able to completely exhaust the budget. Having said that, I believe the timeline is very feasible 

• What is your engagement model with the Polkadot ecosystem? Presumably, in order to gather the information, direction and source material to perform the above deliverables some sort of structure must exist.

For example: "Help land podcasts, AMAs and video interviews around specific product launches."

We do need a team to work with from the Polkadot side, it could be core contributors to the Polkadot ecosystem (we know quite a few) and we do want to have some access to W3F / Parity, meaning, anything that’s happening on the Polkadot front that is conducted through the foundation, we need to know about it first in order to pitch it to the media under embargo. This will include knowing about product launches before they happen, partnerships or deals they are working on etc.

We suggested setting up a group that involves our main POCs for general day to day communication. I would suggest that this would be a combination of core contributors from the Polkadot ecosystem / leading projects as well as W3F / Parity reps.

As for the Thought leadership part and who will do the AMAs/Podcasts - we’d love to get access to Gavin for Interviews, keynotes etc. If not Gavin (since he is generally not very accessible - which I'd LOVE to change) getting someone from Polkadot to become a lot more vocal as the face of the brand along with Gavin to be a bit more aggressive and "shilly" I don't mean Charles Hoskinson "shilly" but there's a good middle ground here, we can decide on core contributors to the ecosystem, but as long as W3F exists, I do think Polkadot should have a face that we can “push”. If we can’t get access to anyone like that, we should be able to suggest these opportunities for anyone that we think could do a good job speaking for Polkadot (could be core contributors, happy to discuss this further and decide/suggest who could be suitable).

I would also suggest a bigger Super event for Polkadot that's more similar to Solana's Breakpoint which is an industry-wide event and not the decentralized nature of decoded which is kinda just for the Polkadot echo-chamber.

• As it relates to content marketing, in your opinion, how does Polkadot differentiate from other ecosystems such as the ones mentioned above.

As I said, I think that Polkadot will always be as successful as the projects building on Polkadot (back in the day we used to push Moonbeam, Acala, Centrifuge etc. and we have newer projects now like Astar) I do think that a big part of our campaign should focus on helping ecosystem projects get their name out there and make noise, this is something worked very well back in 2020/2021 and we should definitely highlight their biz-dev plays (partnerships, product launches, hires, funding rounds) as well as involve them in content marketing plays that are more internal (top X projects building on Polkadot) etc. 

I also think that Polkadot’s tech is a great focus that we can highlight when we compare Polkadot to other chains from a content marketing perspective, but I feel like that was the only focus in the past year and it became a bit too much of an echo-chamber - Polkadot hyping up people who already bought into Polkadot and not new ones. Focusing solely on the tech and the decentralization is what caused the “downfall” of Polkadot’s attention in the media. We can of course focus on the tech at times by comparing Polkadot to other chains, but it can’t be our only focus.

My point is that it's a combo of marketing pushes, biz-dev plays to "activate" these pushes, an active ecosystem of projects building on Polkadot and retail prices that follow which creates that "perfect storm" (which we've already had going for us a couple years back and that’s where I think we can make Polkadot shine again. :)