About — fifteen years across crypto, fintech and B2B tech
Oliver Carding
Marketing leader · Crypto, fintech and B2B tech
I have spent fifteen years building brand, growth and product marketing — long enough to have run search campaigns for boiler manufacturers and asset managers, led a team of five inside eBay, taken a dormant marketing function back to life, and built an NFT project that ended up in Forbes. The through-line is that I have always been the person who has to make the numbers move, not the person who presents the deck about it.
Most of the work I get asked to do starts the same way. A team is busy, the calendar is full, and nobody can say what any of it is producing. That is usually not a channel problem. It is a diagnosis problem, and it is the part of this job I am best at: working out which of the things you are doing is load-bearing, which is theatre, and what the sequence should be from here.
I also still build things myself. I write landing pages rather than briefing them, and I have migrated production sites onto Next.js — this one included. That matters less as a skill than as a habit: I do not hand over recommendations I could not implement.
I am fairly blunt about what marketing can and cannot do. If your product has no audience, no amount of content strategy invents one. I would rather tell you that in the first conversation than in month four.
Where I’ve worked
Agency-side first, then in-house. Fifteen years, in order.
Head of Marketing
Marketing lead for a MiCA-authorised digital-asset firm working in institutional lending and regulated crypto vaults. Strategy, brand, content, PR and demand generation, in close partnership with Legal and Compliance. Took the firm from near-zero press presence to 59 earned-media placements across 20 outlets — including repeat Bloomberg coverage alongside CoinDesk, The Block, Barron’s and Decrypt. Built an SEO-led education programme that made organic search the site’s number-one channel at around 43% of sessions, more than doubled website conversion rate from 0.67% to about 1.5%, and led the migration off a legacy WordPress site onto Next.js.
Head of Marketing
Marketing and communications for Improbable and its spun-out Web3 venture MSquared, across B2B and B2C. Led go-to-market for MSquared’s launch as an independent company and for partner activations with the BBC, Major League Baseball and Yuga Labs. Built the social presence end to end — 900+ posts generating around 1.65 million impressions.
Senior Digital Marketing Lead
Reported to the Marketing Director. Led a team of five across paid and organic for eBay’s Web3 marketplace while also acting as product manager for the marketplace squad. Promoted from contract to permanent within five months.
Head of Multi-Channel Marketing
Led digital strategy and a cross-disciplinary team of five for B2B and B2C clients across travel, finance and energy — among them Liontrust Asset Management, Small Luxury Hotels, Baxi and Brakes. Turned around a dissatisfied key account with a paid and organic audit, cutting cost per lead 40% in six months and growing leads 60% year on year, which made it the agency’s most valuable account.
Head of Multi-Channel Marketing
Led a team of five and merged the organic and paid media departments, running digital strategy for ten client accounts across finance, energy and recruitment — including Aldermore, Cumberland Building Society, Co-op Energy and Morson.
Head of Search
Running the search function across the client base.
Senior Digital Marketing Consultant
Where the search and analytics grounding came from — four years of hands-on SEO, paid search and measurement before managing anyone.
Things I built myself
CryptoKaiju
The first project to link NFTs with physical collectibles, built from proof of concept to a profitable business with more than $250,000 in sales. Ran the whole operation: sourced manufacturers, oversaw production and end-to-end sales, managed front-end development, and led the marketing. Secured partnerships with the NBA, The Sandbox and Dapper Labs.
CoinJournal
Founded and grew a cryptocurrency news publication into one of the sector’s recognised titles — building and leading a team of writers, setting editorial direction, interviewing industry figures, and running advertiser relationships and monetisation.
Bitmain, and a Manchester blockchain consultancy
Paid media, content, PR and social for a leading mining company and for a blockchain consultancy and its clients.
Press and speaking
Where other people have written about the work, or asked me to talk about it.
E-commerce 3.0 with NFTs: Tokenizing Physical Items — panel at NFT.London
Sacramento Kings partner with CryptoKaiju to launch the first physical crypto-collectible in professional sports
Physical meets digital: CryptoKaiju launches first collectible toys on the blockchain
What people who’ve worked with me say
I have genuinely never worked with someone that has such vast and in-depth knowledge of digital marketing than Ollie; his unparalleled knowledge of SEO, Google Ads and Analytics is incredible.
Oliver played an instrumental role in successfully marketing KnownOrigin and putting us on the map from the day we launched. He has a strong work ethic and commitment to success.
Oliver excelled in heading up his department across both product and campaign marketing, demonstrating exceptional leadership and organisational skills.
Oliver is a very capable marketer with a unique blend of technical knowledge and creative vision. His contributions have added value to our marketing team.
Questions people ask first
The ones about money are on the pricing page.
A marketing leader and independent consultant based in Manchester, with fifteen years across brand, growth and product marketing, and in crypto since 2014. Previously Head of Marketing at Improbable and Senior Digital Marketing Lead at eBay, with six years running integrated paid and organic teams agency-side before that. Founded the cryptocurrency publication CoinJournal in 2014 and the physical-to-digital NFT project CryptoKaiju in 2018.
No. I work as an individual. That means you deal with me directly — there is no account manager in between, and nobody more junior doing the work under my name. It also means I take on a limited number of engagements at a time, which is the honest trade-off.
Crypto and Web3, fintech, and B2B technology. The common thread is a product technical enough that most marketers cannot describe it accurately, sold to an audience that can tell when the messaging is thin. That is the gap I am useful in.
Diagnosis first, then the work. Most engagements start with an audit that separates what is structurally broken from what is merely underperforming, and ends with a prioritised plan. After that it is usually two or three disciplines working together — strategy plus SEO and content, or strategy plus paid and measurement — rather than all of them at once.
Yes. I write landing pages rather than briefing them, and I have migrated production sites onto Next.js, including this one. It matters less as a skill than as a habit: I do not hand over recommendations I could not implement myself.