The challenges of cannabis marketing

August 18, 2022 205

When the Super Bowl, the annual playoff championship game of the U.S. National Football League (NFL), is scheduled to be aired worldwide, the most prominent companies buy advertising spaces for airing high-quality, appealing, and innovative commercials.

The occasion is unique. Millions of people watch the final game and the long waited Half-Time Show, where the greatest artists of the music scene perform their most iconic songs. Amid such a spectacular event, cannabis tech company Weedmaps didn't want to lose the opportunity to advertise itself.

The cannabis marketplace and delivery service founded in 2008 in California submitted in early 2022 a commercial to NBC-TV, which aired the event for Super Bowl LVI (56) played on 13 February 2022.Weedmaps's commercial featured a life-sized broccoli sprout (named Brock Ollie) who's tired of being mistaken for something he's not. It was a humoristic commercial as the broccoli emojis are widely used in social media platforms and instant messages apps to represent cannabis, along with leaves and the tree emojis.

However, NBC-TV rejected the commercial, and Weedmaps couldn't advertise its services during the event.It is not the first time a cannabis company can't advertise at Super Bowl. In 2019, the American commercial broadcasts television CBS, which aired the Super Bowl LIII (53), rejected an Acreage Holdings commercial that called for the legalization of medical cannabis.But such rejections don't happen only on top-level events. Although legal cannabis is becoming popular year after year, the marketing of the cannabis industry can be challenging.

Globally, CBD-based products medical and adult-use cannabis topped US$37.4 billion in 2021 and could rise to US$102 billion by 2026, according to a report1 by Prohibition Partner. However, T.V. stations and social media platforms continue to restrict the advertisements related to the industry.

Although international markets including Germany, Israel, and Australia will develop considerably over the following years, adult-use markets in the United States and Canada remain the most critical regions in the world for cannabis sales.In the U.S., cannabis is still illegal at the federal level. Therefore, this makes marketing cannabis challenging.

While alcohol is widely advertised on any platform, cannabis businesses struggle to brand and market themselves and get known to the audiences.Social media platforms, such as Meta's Facebook and Instagram, hold strict prohibitions against any form of promotion and advertising related to cannabis-based products or services. Twitter prohibits the promotion of drugs and drug paraphernalia, including cannabis.

Google doesn't permit ads that promote the use, sale, or even provide informational content about cannabis. Cannabis-related terms, such as marijuana, weed, cannabis, rolling paper, or dispensary, trigger the tech giants' advertising policies. Microsoft Advertising, which provides pay-per-click advertising on the Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo search engines, includes cannabis in the list of healthcare products and supplements that cannot be advertised through its service

Amazon, which recently endorsed a Republican-led bill to legalize cannabis at the federal level, has strict policies on cannabis products sellable on its platform. Although no THC-based products have been found on its digital market store, some retailers placed hemp-based and CBD products, although most are unavailable to buy.

The challenge of cannabis marketing is not limited only to high-THC-based products, as hemp products that don't have psychoactive are subjected to restrictions on social media platforms too.

Although the 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp cultivation in the U.S., retailers struggle to find outlets to sell products. While Facebook's advertising policies don't explicitly prohibit the promotion of hemp or CBD, businesses find it challenging to get the approval of their content that markets cannabis-based products.

Because CBD can also be found in high-THC cannabis, misinformation has led to restrictive and widely disparate policies crafted and implemented by tech giants on how brands can market, communicate and sell their hemp-derived CBD products.

But restrictions on cannabis marketing don't apply only in the U.S. The situation is not different in the United Kingdom and the European Union (E.U.). Advertisers must first ensure that the products are legal to be sold in the U.K. and Europe.

Is this the case with CBD? It depends. The E.U. placed CBD in the Novel Foods Catalogue, subject to the Novel Food Regulation. Novel food is defined as food that humans had not consumed significantly in the E.U. before 15 May 1997. As a result, products subject to this regulation are not marketable without prior approval from the European Commission.

However, acceptance around cannabis consumption continues, although cannabis businesses continue to face roadblocks. Their goal is to reach consumers and empower them to make knowledgeable purchasing decisions.

For these reasons, cannabis companies have devised new strategies to market cannabis products and services.Cannabis companies take the precautions to avoid being shadow banned or restricted on social media platforms by familiarizing themselves with the dos and don'ts of the sites' guidelines. One of the most strategies is creating educational content, which helps businesses increase their "brand authority" and deliver value to their followers—then providing content that complies with the editorial line of the websites that host them.

The risk of being frozen out from the marketing arena brought some cannabis companies to entrust their social marketing activities to cannabis-specific marketing agencies. This made it easier to deal with the strict advertising restrictions and minimize the chances of their social media accounts getting flagged or banned. Some other companies work with social media influencers who have built an authority to market their products.

There are many other strategies that cannabis companies can use to market their products and services that are an alternative to paid ads. Still, these restrictions represent an obstacle to many small companies to emerge, and it looks like that situation won't change until the U.S. administration legalizes cannabis at the federal level.