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Almanak · DeFi / AI agents platform · Three-phase token launch campaign
ALMANAK
When DeFi platform Almanak needed to launch, raise, and move two very different audiences from awareness to action all at once, they turned to McGill Productions. The result: a Legion raise 15× oversubscribed, with $7.5M in requested allocation against a $500,000 target.
BRIEF
Almanak was launching a DeFi platform into a crowded market where trust and clarity are both hard won. The campaign had to do three jobs at once: introduce the brand, make a technical product understandable, and support a live raise. And it had to do all three without losing either of two very different audiences: investors and prospective platform users.
Almanak asked McGill Productions to create a launch campaign that would carry both the brand and the raise. The objective: build a campaign that could explain the platform clearly, establish credibility quickly, and move both audience groups toward action.
The campaign spoke to two audiences in parallel: technical DeFi developers evaluating Almanak's open-source Python SDK, and retail crypto investors deciding whether to back the Legion presale and use the web app. Films ran across Almanak's owned channels (X @Almanak__, Discord, Telegram and Mirror) and were co-distributed through Legion's launchpad and partner ecosystems including NEAR and WOOFi. Every asset was delivered in three aspect ratios (16:9, 1:1 and 9:16) and sequenced across three phases, Launch, Application and Investment, so each audience met the work at the moment it mattered to their decision.
01 // PRE-PRODUCTION
Six weeks between brief and the live raise deadline. Pre-production had to move fast without losing strategic clarity. McGill structured the entire campaign across three phases: a launch phase to introduce Almanak's mission and product vision, an application phase to walk audiences through the SDK and web app, and an investment phase to build urgency with teasers, deadline reminders and countdown assets ahead of the Legion raise.
Each phase was scripted and storyboarded with its own arc and tone, calibrated to where the viewer sat in the journey. A distinct creative register was set for each: cinematic for the hero film, functional for the walkthroughs, urgent for the raise. All of it was held together by a single brand language, so the suite read as one campaign rather than three.
The product walkthroughs combined screen recordings of the SDK and web app with guided UI animations, keeping the product credible to developers while remaining accessible to retail users. The full asset suite ran to one main campaign video plus five cut-downs, mastered for the three campaign phases and the channels supporting each.
Production blended cinematic storytelling with functional, educational content, two visual registers held together by a single brand language. The hero brand film established authority through bold typography, confident pacing and clean motion graphics that signalled innovation without overcomplicating the message.
In post, pacing tightened through the investment phase. Animated overlays and on-screen typography highlighted deadlines and milestones as the raise approached, with motion graphics used sparingly to reinforce value propositions without crowding the frame.
Almanak entered Legion with a $500,000 target for its first community round. The raise closed 15× oversubscribed, attracting $7.5M in requested allocation, a result delivered into one of the coldest fundraising windows DeFi had seen in two years. Engagement held from pre-launch through the deadline, with the three-phase Brand / Product / Investment campaign converting attention into deposited capital rather than passive followers.
The momentum compounded. Almanak went on to raise a Delphi-led $8.45M round in August 2025, and a follow-on Legion Presale that closed 400% oversubscribed in 40 minutes, both built on the brand foundation laid by the launch. By December 2025, Almanak had over 100,000 users and peaked at $132M in TVL; the 'An Agentic Future' positioning carried directly into the growth story.
The work was shortlisted for Motion Graphics & Animation at the Prolific North Creative Awards 2025, recognised alongside McGill's Protein Works campaigns as one of the standout entries of the year.
"We're very satisfied with McGill's services. Their independent work, quick iterations and high-quality results freed up our time to focus on other priorities. It's exactly what we needed during our fundraising efforts."
Agnes Kocsis, DeFi Research and Growth at Almanak
Every deliverable was edited, graded, mixed and exported across the three formats, then repurposed across email, web and social to extend reach beyond the initial raise window, giving Almanak a launch footprint that carried beyond the raise itself.
A technical launch under a hard deadline doesn't need one hero film doing all the work. It needs a phased campaign where each beat serves a different audience at a different point in the funnel. Splitting the work into Launch (brand), Application (product) and Investment (conversion) let one body of work speak to developers, retail users and investors without any of the three feeling like an afterthought.
The second lesson is register. Cinematic storytelling carries credibility; functional walkthroughs carry proof. Running both inside the same visual system, with the same typography, motion language and colour, is what lets a fintech or Web3 brand sound serious to developers and approachable to retail in the same campaign. And the six-week turnaround held because the strategy was settled at the brief, not improvised in the edit.