While the crypto industry is rife with news, change and innovation, it still only captures around 5 percent of the global market, according to data from Triple A. Meaning—as a sector poised for massive growth—those who are currently playing in the sandbox might have a “leg up” on those who watch cautiously from the sidelines.

One executive who made the leap from traditional marketing to web3 is Andrew Saunders, chief growth officer at SKALE Labs. And while Saunders’ background on paper reflects a traditional marketing trajectory, his work at these web2 companies has been anything but, and led him to pursue an innovative sector like blockchain.

Having previously engineered creative campaigns and media partnerships for over 250 global brands like Activision, Airbnb, Apple, BMW, Chase, Google, Intel, Netflix, and Starbucks—and having worked with over 300 artists including Justin Bieber and Chris Pratt—Saunders eventually made the transition from Hollywood to crypto, where he served as the first chief marketing officer at Arbitrum, leading its global marketing efforts.

Now, at SKALE—a “gas free” blockchain that has over 5 million active wallets, averages 50 million monthly transactions, and is the leading gaming chain with over 230,000 active gamers—Saunders is positioned to do what he does best: Innovate—but now in an industry enthusiastic about innovation. What was once 10 percent of his “traditional” marketing job is now full time.

“I was doing influencer marketing before influencers existed because I had celebrities on social platforms that had audiences and reach. I wanted to crack the code and utilize it from a traditional media perspective.”

— Andrew Saunders

Saunders’ career began at Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in its Foundation unit, where he helped build philanthropic charities for celebrities to connect them to legitimate charitable organizations.

“I knew I wanted to get into marketing, but rather than join the company’s marketing team representing brands on a retainer basis, I started the brand partnerships division,” Saunders  said to me in a recent interview. “At that point, I was really the bridge between Hollywood and Madison Avenue—helping bridge two industries that speak very different languages and approach things very differently.”

Brand partnerships eventually merged with CAA’s mergers and acquisitions team, which provided Saunders and his group access to Silicon Valley funding. The team began working with venture capitalists to build and incubate start-up businesses for clients like Tom Hanks and Ashton Kutcher, and was also initially responsible for putting celebrities on Facebook and multi-channel networks on YouTube.

“Social media also started to pick up, and I think those of us who were digitally savvy to some extent knew the impact it would have on Hollywood and our clients,” Saunders said. “I was doing influencer marketing before influencers existed because I had celebrities on social platforms that had audiences and reach. I wanted to crack the code and utilize it from a traditional media perspective.”

After a decade or so at CAA, Saunders segued to NBCUniversal—at the time, the world’s largest traditional media company—to build their in-house agency.

Listen: DeCent People With Jack O’Holleran of SKALE Labs

“My role again was working with major brands around $150 million marketing campaigns—some of the largest marketing campaigns in the world,” Saunders said. “These were things that leveraged every single entity under the NBCUniversal umbrella—from television to theme parks to motion studios to celebrity talent—you name it.”

Saunders grew the NBCUniversal team to around 60 people and generated around $1 billion per year in partner revenue. But because he likes to build from within as a self-described “in-treprenuer,” he eventually wanted to return to work at a smaller company.

That company was Tastemade, which Saunders helped grow to have more than 300 million monthly active viewers. Amazon invested in the firm and two weeks later hired Saunders to build its global entertainment and culture practice. That division handled everything from Super Bowl ads to Prime Day to the sides of trucks to boxes being delivered, and he was brought on to help reach a younger audience through all of the company’s verticals.  

The crypto rabbit hole

But then Covid-19 hit, which provided Saunders the window of opportunity he needed to discover web3.

“I was at home during the pandemic going for daily mental health walks and became crypto curious,” he said. “First I wanted to know everything about Ethereum, then I wanted to understand Layer 2s, then I wanted to understand oracles and nodes, and it just kept going.”

He began speaking with his venture capitalist friends to find out where they were investing.

“You always want to go into a growth industry versus an industry that’s constantly consolidating like entertainment,” Saunders said. “Having worked with so many emerging industries, the one I figured would be most stable was infrastructure.”

Saunders then interviewed at companies like Chainlink, Arbitrum and Polygon, eventually becoming the first chief marketing officer at Arbitrum and the first chief marketing and strategy officer at a cross-chain DEX aggregator.

“I’ve always been fascinated by technology that can truly change the world,” Saunders said. “We call it web3 for a reason—because it can revolutionize finance, entertainment, art and science—all of these different industries. I also grew up fairly low-income and come from a fairly diverse family, so crypto’s notion of ‘by the people for the people’ was something that very much attracted me to it.”

“The tech is incredible and the team is incredible—people just don’t know about it. SKALE is the fastest and cheapest chain people have never heard of.”

— Andrew Saunders

While many folks are drawn to crypto to “get a bag,” Saunders is more focused on the altruistic potential of blockchain tech.

“As someone in their 40s who has children and a family, it’s really about leaving this world better than I entered it,” he said. “I’ve been a global guy for eight or nine years—I’ve had teams in Japan, Brazil, the UK and Australia—and what I’ve seen over and over again is the country you were born into, the parents you were born into, the socio-economic conditions you were born into dictate your future and your potential. With crypto, you finally have an industry that can actually raise-up the 99 percent and become this great equalizer.”

One example of how Saunders has used blockchain to create better global equity is by paying U.S. rates to talent he’s hired from all over the world.

“It’s what’s right and what I think is ethical,” Saunders said. “A lot of these folks turn to me and say, ‘First off, thank you, I never would have been able to get a job like this in my own country.’”

The opportunity to innovate was also one of the driving factors behind Saunders’ decision to join SKALE—that and the belief SKALE co-founders Jack O’Holleran (a DeCent People podcast guest) and Stan Kladko are building in crypto for the “right” reasons—to decentralize and democratize.

Not a Layer 1 nor a Layer 2

“The tech is incredible and the team is incredible—people just don’t know about it,” Saunders said. “SKALE is the fastest and cheapest chain people have never heard of.”

Which is a thrill for Saunders because there’s nothing better than marketing a great product you believe in.

“SKALE is intentionally built differently,” Saunders said. “We’re not a Layer 1, we’re not a Layer 2—we have aspects and components of each, which has enabled us to have a very frictionless onboarding experience.” SKALE prides itself on being the “gas free” blockchain network—which, if you’ve ever completed a crypto transaction, you know just how onerous those fees can be.

“If you live in an emerging economy or lower income country, a one dollar or ten cent gas fee is not meaningless,” Saunders said. “Those numbers add up over time, especially when gas fees surge. By being gas free, we’re making blockchain and crypto more accessible to everyone regardless of their socio-economic conditions.”

It’s a non-traditional mission by a non-traditional marketer, made possible by existing inside a non-traditional space.

“Crypto enables that,” Saunders said. “I’ve never found an industry that’s so wide open.”

lead image: Andrew Saunders’s PFP