How a career in creative production became a path to shaping the conversation of web3 video marketing
Tell us about yourself and what you do at thirdweb.
I’m Sian, I lead video and animation efforts at thirdweb which entails a lot of project management and making sure that projects are on time and of the highest quality.
I make sure that we’re always improving our outputs in an efficient way to make sure we’re making the most of our time. It can be hard to work at a mostly remote company when you’re scattered across timezones so looking after our rest is important and I factor that into how I support the team and how to meet the company’s needs.
What are the values/team principles of the marketing team?
Teamwork and collaboration are definitely felt within the team. We work on big projects and they’re things not one person could complete on their own. We’ll break these down section by section and divide and conquer. That’s sort of our team motto—divide and conquer.
We’ll also pull in cross functional team mates like designers to make sure our branding is consistent as we evolve.
The creative block is also a real thing and sometimes after a good rest period you come back refreshed and have some new ideas. Being able to do this with our team makes us stay creative and work to the highest quality.
Iterating up is also a big one. We always look at new ways to better our productions whether that means looking at competitors or big events that are happening — like for example the Apple Key Note speeches. They use simplistic animation which can be quite complex but it comes out looking very clean.
If you look at our videos from last year to now, the production quality has increased so much and so well. This is where being students of web3 is also a value that I feel on the marketing team. We learn from one another and discover new tools that we can use. I did this with our Editor, Andrew when he joined and the production quality of our work has definitely improved.
We have different strengths and applying them in a supportive way to dissect our work together helps us put out work that’s high quality and helps us learn really quickly.
How does thirdweb view marketing and content?
A builder can build a home, but without the marketing you aren’t going to have a tenant to live in it or someone to buy it. It’s sort of the same within what we’re doing at thirdweb. The engineers know our product and can build really well but without our marketing team we’ll miss out on new users or the ability to build community on social media.
We put our core messages for each of our products that we support users with on our different channels. This helps us make sure we can show our product through quick animation, tutorials, and harness the power of engineering. So we’re really a vehicle for users to use thirdweb in a way that is best going to benefit them.
Tell us about thirdweb’s approach to marketing
Because the web3 space is so new, it’s really hard to build a marketing strategy because there’s no one to learn from. For example, previously I was at a biotech startup and there’s so many other biotech organizations that you can sort of draw inspiration from. In web3 — the amount of companies in the space aren’t as many and not as many doing it as well as we are.
So we need to look in different directions for inspiration and rely on a high level of experimentation and look at ways to further understand our audience and their needs.
We need to be creating content for what the audience wants vs what we think they want. Atif, our VP of Business mentioned this to our team and it’s really something we’ve embodied and then iterated from there.
It’s about finding out what works, what doesn’t work, and learning from those things to understand how the data tells us a story.
The team has varied backgrounds and levels of experience, how does this impact the work that we do on the marketing team?
Our team are from different parts of the globe which is great. It means we have a different understanding and experience and outlooks on life. Experience brings in different perspectives especially when we’re trying to create good content.
For example, we’re trying to highlight and use as many different people as possible when it comes to creating content. So it’s never repetitive — we reach out to different people on the team and influencer videos. People connect with people and at the end of the day if we’re showing the same person over and over again—they may deliver a line perfectly but may not be right for our audience. If someone is potentially going into being a web3 developer, we have to ask: who are they connecting the most with? That’s where we apply as much variety into our content as possible.
Similarly from an internal perspective, we have so many different skillsets on the team and have different levels of knowledge of web3 — most are self taught. In this way we can internally see if what we’re putting out is accurate and something our audience will understand.
What are some of the main obstacles our team faces and how do they overcome them?
What could be an obstacle and challenge actually works in our favour. As our team is so global there’s a matter of 16 hours between two people which means working flexibly within the company and work remote-first. It’s a huge benefit and where it would normally be really difficult. We leverage asynchronicity to make sure we can pass the baton to collaborate on tight deadlines.
This means you also get two different perspectives on one piece which you wouldn’t necessarily get if you’re working side by side with someone. In this way we increase our rate of production since one person will be resting while the other is getting on with the work and vice versa which keeps different ideas and perspectives going.
Thirdweb is a young company, what are you actively working on that you know is making a positive impact on our company vision?
Our push on showing solutions is going to impact user acquisition. Actually showing people what our tools can do is really amplifying our message, getting us to have more users and retain our community.
Being able to bring a product to life in a way that captures the viewer/potential user is definitely a way that connects users, brings new people in and gets thirdweb’s name out there.
That hugely impacts our presence as a thought leader in the space.
Authors: Erika Khanna and Sian Morton
Contributors: Joher Khan
