How MetaMask Thinks About Paid Media, Privacy, and Making Crypto Part of Daily Life

It was a gradual transition. After university I joined Thales, a large engineering firm, working in their R&D department. From there I moved into data science, then growth hacking, and eventually into growth and marketing more broadly.

The good thing is I still use my technical background every day. It shapes how I think about measurement, optimization, and building systems around paid media.

Privacy and data tracking, without question. At MetaMask I run paid media, media partnerships, and our KOL program. Basically anything where we're paying for marketing.

The core challenge is attribution. Someone clicks an ad, creates an account, starts trading perps. We want to trace that on-chain activity back to the ad that drove it. But at the same time, we want zero cookies, zero personal data collection. We want to be as private as possible.

That tension is the hardest part of moving from web2 to web3: finding new ways to measure impact without compromising user privacy.

On top of that, there's an education gap. Decentralization, self-custody, on-chain finance: these concepts are still new for most people.

It's two things. First, new user onboarding. But more importantly, it's about moving people from traditional finance into web3 and making crypto part of their daily lives. Buying coffee, getting paid at the end of the month. That's our biggest growth ambition as a company.

Any financial system needs to let people do four things: get paid, pay others, earn and save, and report on their activity. We're building MetaMask to cover all of that without needing a bank. Get paid, pay, stake, invest, track your transactions. We want to be the alternative to traditional banking.

It's roughly an even three-way split.

First, paid social and display. We're on X, Reddit, Telegram. On the display side we work with HypeLab, plus CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, and Etherscan for high-converting placements like buy buttons.

Second, media partnerships. We work with outlets like Bankless and Crypto Banter, web3 podcasters, newsletters. We've also started partnering with research institutes in China and Korea, which has been interesting.

Third, KOLs and influencers. This is especially important in markets where paid crypto advertising is banned. You can't run crypto ads in China, for example, so KOLs are how we reach that audience.

We partnered with Polymarket last November to bring prediction markets directly into MetaMask. With the World Cup coming up in June across the US, there's a natural audience overlap: people who are into sports betting, and people who are into crypto. Those two circles overlap, and we want to expand that intersection.

The question is: how do we reach people who are into both crypto and sports betting? And how do we pull sports gamblers into the crypto world?

One thing we're doing is running ads on in-flight entertainment systems on planes heading to World Cup host cities. We know those flights are full of football fans. It's a captive, high-intent audience.

The challenge is that this is probably the most expensive event in the world to advertise around. The biggest exchanges will outspend everyone, so we have to be smarter about where we show up.

A few things stand out. Having a direct line to Zach and Joe is huge. We had a situation where we needed to pause campaigns urgently. We messaged on Telegram and within 10 minutes everything was paused. In web2, with organizations that large, that kind of responsiveness is impossible.

The on-chain targeting is great. Being able to reach people who have active wallets connected to dApps is exactly the kind of precision we need.

The format variety is also a big plus. Native, display, video, lots of different sizes. It means we can rotate creative without fatiguing the audience.

Data access is solid, crypto payments save us money, and the platform itself is clean and intuitive. The campaign creation wizard just makes sense.

Two things. First, ad previews in context. I'd love to see what our ads look like on a specific publisher site before we go live, like a mock-up on DexTools or CoinGecko.

Second, a publisher inventory list. Some competing networks put out a monthly PDF showing all their sites and available placements. Something like that would be really useful. Our leadership asked us "where exactly is our HypeLab spend going?" We could say 300+ websites, but they want specifics: which sites, what formats, banner vs native.

My colleague Joanna and I have been running web3 paid media for about four years now. We've tried pretty much every tool out there. HypeLab is genuinely good. Consistent, fast, easy to use. The campaign creation flow makes sense. It just works.