When Antidote began working with Avantgarde and its founder, Mona El Isa, the business was a new player in the decentralised finance sector. With an impressive career at Goldman Sachs and Jabre Capital, Mona is an expert in the industry, but that expertise had not been shared in the media.

Our role was to build the profile of the business and Mona with the key audiences, traditional investors and crypto-natives. The objective was to raise awareness of Avantgarde’s offering and its key points of difference.

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We developed an initial six-month media strategy that launched Avantgarde to the media. The team also implemented a proactive strategy for ongoing news commentary to establish Mona’s credibility as a spokesperson on DeFi news.

By working with Avantgarde to agree key messages in advance and constantly monitoring the media for potential opportunities, we are able to develop insightful quotes with new points of view and deliver them to journalists quickly.

This strategy has ensured that the momentum we generated with the initial media introductions has been maintained, with a regular stream of coverage even when Avantgarde doesn’t have news to share. In this way, we’re able to keep Avantgarde front-of-mind with our key media publications, continually building brand awareness with their target audiences.

When Avantgarde has a product or company news to share, we can take advantage of its newly developed reputation to secure placements across industry titles.

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We introduced Mona and Avantgarde to the media with interviews conducted with Financial Times, City AM, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, CoinTelegraph, The Defiant and CoinDesk. As a result of this work and our ongoing reactive press office, Mona has become a go-to commentator for the DeFi industry, with journalists frequently reaching out to us for her contributions.

In addition to organising nine interviews with key journalists at national, international and trade media, we have delivered 190 pieces of coverage internationally in the first 18 months of working with Avantgarde, with more than 100 of those coming from our proactive commentary on key industry news stories, such as ETF approvals and regulation developments. This surge in coverage also led to a significant increase in inbound leads for Avantgarde, as the company’s public-facing brand became well-established.