027 James Maddison
Global Marketing Director, Blockchain.com
James Maddison is Global Marketing Director at Blockchain.com. His career has taken him from adventure publishing to home renovation to fintech, with nearly three years at TradingView as Chief Marketing Officer. He founded AI creative consultancy Prompt and is a firm proponent of “micromastery”, which you can read more about on his website.
“iwoca under Joost Versteeg is an absolute marketing machine.”
The interview
What’s your coffee ritual?
Wake up: cup of tea. Then I’ll go to the office and have a black Americano. I’ll follow this about an hour later with a second. Then, throughout the afternoon, yet more tea.
What was your first marketing job?
I was a ‘wingman for adventurers’ for an agency in Shoreditch. They’d signed up a bunch of famous outdoors folk to represent and needed someone to tend to their needs, and their egos. I had a background in adventure travel, so got the gig.
What finance apps do you have on your home screen?
Blockchain.com, naturally, for the crypto. TradingView for the financial info. Lightyear for the investing. Revolut for the banking.
Which newsletter, podcast, or book do you recommend most?
I’ve just finished reading Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt. It’s only the third novel to make the Financial Times’s Business Book of the Year longlist and it’s stellar.
What’s an underrated growth channel in fintech?
Merchandising cross-collaboration. Joining forces with physical goods companies on limited edition drops creates engaging surprise and delight campaigns, and cross-pollinates audiences.
What keeps you up at night?
Brand cohesion. Blockchain.com has pretty much the longest tenure in crypto of any business. It’s global, with an institutional and consumer arm and a wide suite of products. Ensuring both creative excellence and design consistency across so many people and touch points is usually what I obsess about late at night when the caffeine won’t leave my system.
What are the most useful measurement tools you use in your work?
I was always a bit of an Ahrefs fan, but I recently switched to Semrush and have been impressed by how much they’ve added over recent years. Most of my time, however, is spent in Metabase looking at our own data.
What’s one fintech brand (other than your own) that’s getting marketing right?
iwoca under Joost Versteeg is an absolute marketing machine.
Why is marketing so hard?
I guess a unique challenge to marketing is that – while its fundamental frameworks are evergreen – specific implementations really are not. If you’re reading about an activation that’s absolutely ideal for your brand, chances are its value has already been diminished by someone else being first out the gate with that idea. I don’t think you could say the same for ops or finance, for example.