Ep 68: State of Cannabis Marketing 2024

Lisa Buffo, founder and CEO of the Cannabis Marketing Association (CMA), presented the annual “State of Cannabis Marketing” webinar, reflecting on the past year and predicting trends for 2025. Key points included the impact of reduced marketing budgets, with cannabis marketers averaging 1-2% of revenue compared to the industry average of 7.7%. Significant events discussed were the delayed “cookie apocalypse,” the rise of AI in marketing, and the potential implications of the 2024 U.S. election on cannabis policy. Buffo emphasized the importance of in-person events and human connection in a digital age, urging marketers to prepare for AI’s impact and to have crisis PR plans in place.

Lisa Buffo  0:00

Lisa, Hi everybody. Welcome to today’s episode of Party. Like a marketer, today’s episode is going to be a little different. It’s a solo episode with me, your host, Lisa Buffo, the founder and CEO of cannabis Marketing Association, and I’m sharing with you a webinar, the annual one that I do for CMA members, called the state of cannabis marketing, where I reflect on the past year and talk about what’s happened in the industry, both from a cannabis perspective as well as a marketing industry perspective, what were major events that happened? How does it impact marketers? And what are predictions for 2025 and I do it largely based off of everything I know. So that includes speaking with members and marketers throughout the year, what I see in the news and what I know about what’s happening on the ground. And this is a zoom presentation that I do that has an accompanying PowerPoint and slides with it. So if you’re listening today and you want to see the slides, you can check them out on our YouTube channel, but for the most part, the speech that I give reflects what is said on the slides. So if you’re listening and can’t hear the slides, you should be able to understand almost everything that I’m talking about, but you can see the full presentation on our YouTube channel as well. And if you’re new here, thank you for listening and for being with us. This episode is premiering on Thanksgiving week, and I am grateful and have gratitude for all of our members and listeners and subscribers and supporters of CMA and all the work that we do, we are a small business as well, and couldn’t do any of this without your support and engagement. So thank you so much. It really has been a pleasure of mine over the years to host this podcast and to speak and learn from all of you, all of you are my greatest teachers, and I really hope this presentation is insightful. So please enjoy. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your time today, and we’re going to get started. So yeah, like I mentioned, we’re going to look back, we’re going to look forward. I’m going to give you my takes on things, and then we’ll open it up to questions. So if you are new, if you’re not a member of CMA, or you’re new to our organization, thank you for coming and spending time with us today. We are a membership group focused on education and best practices for industry communications professionals. I am a marketer by trade. I’m a former cannabis CMO. I do fractional marketing consulting and cmo work. And I founded CMA really in response to the problems I was having doing cannabis marketing back in 2014 to 2016 and realizing that my marketing playbook didn’t apply directly to the cannabis industry, and it was very challenging. And saw the need for community, for marketers to communicate with each other, learn from each other, given that, while we’re not completely reinventing the wheel in some ways, in some ways, we are, and that the best way for us to really continue to move our own jobs and professional industry in this space forward is to collaborate with each other, and also very much so of the belief that we have such marketing, in some ways, doesn’t get its full due credit. I’m highly biased, but marketers are the ones who put out the content that the public sees, or the ones who speak with media and the journalists, largely speaking, from a communications perspective. And so the work that we do, the content we put out, really is needle moving, both in terms of public perception, among many other things. So it is important for us to have community with each other and do our best by our businesses and by the industry as a whole. So CMA really works to hold space for that, and we do content like this. So we do webinars throughout the year. Each month, we put out downloadable content white papers. We have a survey, which I’ll get to in a minute. But what we’re really trying to do is learn from you as well and uplift you, the marketers who are on the front lines who are working every day, and give you a platform to communicate with your peers and share what you know. So this one, I lead, this specific presentation, but throughout the year and throughout our content is led by our members. We just did a presentation on Tuesday that was slightly out of the norm, but we talked about organization, the Para method, organization and marketing and managing assets and managing projects, we talk about all the different areas, from branding to SEO to regulations. We cover a wide range of topics, and that’s what we’re really here to do, is help you do your nine to five better. So if you have any questions about CMA, please reach out to me. And our team, and we’re happy to talk with you about member benefits as well in getting you involved. And if you’re a member or considering joining and you have a specific need say there’s something you’re struggling with in your day to day, something you don’t understand in any topic broadly under that marketing communications umbrella, let us know we are planning our 2025 calendar and content now, and we really do take your feedback seriously and plan accordingly. So if we, if we had a few members, reach out to us, and they’re really struggling with regulations in this area or this certain topic, we will make sure we are programming accordingly so that you have the resources you need. So please don’t hesitate to reach out and email me with any feedback, input, thoughts, ideas, suggestions. You can email membership at marketing cannabis.org or my personal email is Lisa at marketing cannabis.org and if you if you’re not a member, and you join, in the next 24 hours, we are doing an end of Year special, you can use the code November 10 on the website, and that’ll get you 10% off membership. Okay, these, we already did these, but our member events from earlier this week, we talked about messy marketing and bringing method, the Para method, bringing order to chaos on Tuesday for members that will be in the online member portal by the end of day tomorrow, as well as with this presentation, and we also did our members only quarterly online networking event yesterday. So these are in the past, but we are doing them again moving forward. So keep an eye on our events page, on our website to participate in events like that. So getting into the meat and potatoes of our presentation, I wanted to do a temperature check with all of you today on how your year went. And you can kind of answer this however you want, but I am asking from that marketing lens, and likely that sort of top line revenue lens, like, Did you hit your goals? Did your business have a good year? Did marketing go well for you? So if you can throw in the chat either the dollar signs or the exclamation points or let me know. I would love to get a temperature read from the audience today on how 2024 went for you in your marketing roles. For us, we were somewhere in the middle, probably more on the room, on fireside, but it was definitely a year of both, and lots of ups and downs, but I would say more on the it was a crazy year. But what else is new in this space? But if anyone wants to let me know, just throw it in, how your year went? Good, bad, positive. Did you meet your goals? Did you not Lara said not as good as last year. So very similar. Yeah, that was the theme we saw with the group last week and with our members as well, that it was more a difficult year than it was a positive year. And the cannabis industry definitely goes through cycles. Every business goes through cycles. You know, the pandemic years were harder to some degree than there was a nice little rebound, I think, for the industry, in 2122 the last two years, 23 and 24 I think we’re definitely more on the difficult side. So let’s talk about what that could mean, what some observations that we saw. So one standard metric I like to look at is this data that comes out of Gartner. So Gartner is a large, large company that does a lot of things, but one of the things that they do is an annual cmo survey, and they interview about four or 500 CMOS actually looks like last year was about 403 95 across industries in North America, about what they’re they ask a lot of questions, but this sort of North Star data point I like to look at is budget in relation to revenue. Now there are different benchmarks for this. And again, this is a whole across business types. So service businesses are going to have a different number than CPG businesses are going to have a different number than software businesses, but as a whole, if you’re looking at budget as a percentage of revenue this year, it was on average 7.7% which is a low from pre pandemic times. So pre pandemic times, when

Lisa Buffo  9:16

this chart indexed even further back, 16, 1718, we were looking at numbers 2016, 1718, we were looking at numbers like 10 and 11% so one of every $10 roughly, was able, from a revenue perspective, to go to marketing. Now that number obviously dropped greatly during the pandemic. So you know, 6% there was a correction there in 2021 felt like a real nice rebound in 22 and then it has been slowly going down since it was possible 23 was a blip, right? Only point 4% not that much. Who knows, right? Maybe, maybe it was just a weird year. But 24 we’ve seen almost a two point drop, almost so seven point. 7% so budgets as a whole are slowly going down. And if you look at all the data and information from this report, the main takeaway is that marketers are having to do more, and expectations are higher, but their resources and budgets are less. So we’re going to talk about what that means in a minute. But as a whole, the industry, and I say industry, from a marketing industry perspective, trend is that budgets are going down. At CMA, we have done some of our own research with our members, not as maybe perhaps large or formal as an organization like Gartner, but the number we’ve gotten that average marketing budgets are as a percent of total revenue for cannabis marketers is closer to one, 2% sometimes less. So even if those numbers are off a little bit, that’s a big difference between 789, percent. And we know that with 280, marketing expenses aren’t able to be written off as a whole for licensed businesses the way these companies might be, these are non to 80 e applicable businesses. So we’re already trying to do more with less and buy less, a lot less. But the trend is, is that outside of the industry, budgets are going down. And we have seen that as well, inside of the industry too, when they were already quite bare bones. But the overall trend is budgets are going down. So in looking at that a little more in depth, and I will send you the link to the more full report with this and the follow up to today’s webinar is that about a quarter of CMOs are saying that they only a quarter are saying that they have sufficient budget to accomplish their goals, which means that three quarters, about 75% don’t have enough budget to accomplish their goals. That might seem really obvious, but that has not been the case in years past. And if you look at where these numbers were right from even last year to this year, it’s a 15% year over year decline. So you know that is a substantial number when we’re talking about marketing budgets, but that means that at this point, marketers have to deliver more with less. That is the name of the game, and we’re going to talk about what that means and how that has changed things. But another big takeaway from the survey, which we have seen as well, is that AI is hugely impacting marketing. That’s probably one of the largest changes from a marketing industry perspective that we’ve seen in the last year or two. But it was very much so accelerated in 2024 than it was in 2023 and we’re gonna get into that. Okay, so looking back at what happened in 2024 there’s a lot of current events we could talk about, but I picked three specifically, what are the bellwether events that I think impacted our space and why? Again, I could talk about this for hours, because there’s way more than these three, but these are the three biggest and most significant and important ones that I think happened the election being one of those, which, when I gave this presentation last week, we were maybe not even a week off of the election. We’re now two, three weeks. Now at this point, I don’t know, November is going really fast. The dust is settling a little bit from that, and we’re starting to get a slightly more clear perspective of what might be happening. But it was definitely a bellwether event of the year, but the three events were the cookie apocalypse, which we will talk about, which was Google’s planned phasing out of cookies in tracking and search, which did not happen. Supposed to happen. It didn’t happen. This change that AI is having on search marketing, which is a massive change. We’ll get into that. But now I’m sure you know, if you Google something, instead of clicking through the first three results and coming up with whatever you think the right answer would be, and doing your own research, AI is giving an answer Google’s AI by doing that itself, and it’ll just kind of tell you, and almost to some degree, take away the need for having to go and click through, which has big changes for search marketing and big changes for marketing as a whole, given that we live in the digital age and then the election as well. So let’s get into these three events. So the cookie apocalypse, as it was so affectionately called, within the marketing and ad tech space, was that Google Chrome, which holds 60% of the web browser market share had plans and plans for around the last five years that they were going to disable third party cookies. Now, third party cookies are the technology tool that kind of track your history across the Internet and give that information back to advertisers and help determine what content you’re seeing and what ads you might see moving forward, which is why, if you go shop for red shoes on macy.com’s and then you go read the news on NPR, and then you go research their vacation up here, you might see those ads for red shoes follow you across that that is cookies at work here. So. And when I gave this presentation at the end of last year, so it was November, December, 23 this was the big thing. Plan for this. Marketers, ad tech folks, plan for this phase out. It was supposed to happen. There was much to do about it. A lot of companies spent time and effort to plan for the phase out. And then in July, Google said they’re not doing it for now. It is not canceled entirely. It has been pushed back to 2025 but it is a for now. Thing that didn’t happen in 2024 what they have done is that you now have more agency over those choices. If you opt out of cookies or you kind of like, look at the settings and see more when you’re browsing, it looks more like what you would see when you search in Europe, where you can be more specific and more detailed in terms of what you want to see or what you will allow from a cookie tracking perspective, and in the short term, this is somewhat of a win for ad tech companies, but in other ways, they were also planning for this to not change. So that’s a little bit of a double edged sword. But the other part that is important about this is if you’ve been reading the news currently, the Department of Justice has been in suit against Google for antitrust violations and has been trying to break up Google for having a monopoly on particularly for web browser market share, for having a monopoly on that, for having exclusive deals with Android and Apple that Google is that Chrome is the default browser, and if you look at that, the that’s been litigated over the years, and right now, the Department of Justice has recommended that Google sell off Chrome, which Google is fighting. There is federal litigation happening around anti competitive practices with Google and that they have obviously. I mean, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use Chrome as their main it is, but they definitely have very clear market share there. But there are implications for that in terms of what may or may not happen in the future. And again, that is also somewhat unclear, given the change we will be having in our federal government, here in the States as well. But if you want to do a little research, look up Google and their DOJ suits specific to Google Chrome, and look up a little more about the cookie Apocalypse, and you’ll see some overlap there. But again, point being for us and as cannabis marketers and in the ad tech space, as online advertising has been more available to cannabis companies and more friendly over time. Over the years, there used to be very little tolerance. Now there is more room and more space for that, as well as new states coming online, all those factors coming together that this cookie Apocalypse on pause can and will have implications for us too. So if you’re not familiar with this, familiarize yourself and how it can play into your specifically paid media and paid advertising plans. So TBD will get back to this in 2025 we’ll see what happens. But that is where things stand with Google right now. Now AI again, I could do like, three hours on AI and how it has changed things, so we’ll keep it very high level today. But there has been a huge jump in AI and marketing adoption from 2023 to 2024 so 64% of marketers are already using it now,

Lisa Buffo  18:23

and that those who that number has jumped up from 23 to 24 so we’re seeing now a critical mass of adoption. It’s over half over one and two, called six and 10. Almost seven in 10 marketers are using AI and automation. And if you have implemented it or haven’t already, it is very powerful, and marketers are lots of lots of jobs are going to be affected by AI. I just saw a study in the New York Times that said that AI did a better job of diagnosing patients than doctors, and they had a whole whole thing on that, but basically anything in any job that synthesizes data and creates insults or generates content generative AI, right? Is, is going to be impacted by the adoption of this technology, and we know most a lot of what we do in marketing is creating content, creating ads, creating campaigns and executing on them. So AI is, is becoming a reality of our day to day. So Gartner, that same organization that I mentioned, is predicting that by 2026 so in two years already, it’s pretty fast, that 80% of advanced creative roles in marketing will be tasked with using generative AI, or Gen AI, by 2026 now think about like who are advanced creative roles in marketing that could be art directors at marketing agencies, senior graphic designers, folks who are just like the strategists, coming up with campaigns, coming up with ideas that those folks, even the create advanced creative roles, where maybe you had to have an art degree or lots of years and experience. Science in generating that yourself, AI is going to 80% largely take over, given Gartner’s predictions, and to a degree to which we’re seeing, I think, in many ways, how our fractured media and digital landscape is impacting us as a as a whole, societally and in our businesses, Google’s actually piloting enhanced AI features that would actually customize headlines based on target user search intent. And that could be a slippery slope in many different ways. There’s a lot of kind of ethical and moral and, you know, conversations that need to be had around AI and its uses, but you can see how AI creating custom, tailored content, which is sort of already happening with the with algorithms, where they’re showing you what they think you want to see, and more information based on what you’re searching, but actually changing headlines and content based on search intent is really going another step further. So Google is already playing with that, and there’s so much to talk about AI, but these are the big ways it is starting to be very much so a day to day reality for all of us, and we are not immune to any of this in cannabis at all. And so Salesforce also, I’m sure you’re all familiar with Salesforce. They’re a large CRM software, but they’ve got a whole marketing suite. They have a sales suite, massive tech company that many businesses, and particularly large businesses, use. But they also have a state of marketing report, and I read it and went through their AI findings, and they found that for the most part, marketers top priorities related to AI and their challenges are similar, with the first being that actually implementing it and leveraging AI is a number one priority, but it’s also difficult to do right now. So just as an indication in a sense of what our priorities, what our marketing department spending their time on, it’s adopting new technology and doing it so successfully. You can also see, you know, where there’s overlap here, improving marketing ROI and attribution, so getting clearer right on how our leads coming in, how are views coming in, engaging with customers in real time is a top priority and challenge that’s kind of core to marketing, right? How do you meet your customers, where they’re at, your leads, where they’re at, your prospects, where they’re at and in a way, and with messaging that resonates with them, that is also something AI can be a part of, and then building trust. So number three on challenges, but as a priority, is building and retaining trust with customers. And I’ll get to one of my like takes in a minute, but I do think that the increased use of generative AI content, to some degree, is going to create less trust. Um, and we’ll see how that actually plays out and how it is received, but that’s very much something our whole society is in the midst of understanding right now. But trust with customers, and trust with customers in relation to a brand, not only how it markets and how it communicates, but how it manages and handles its whole business is going to be a really interesting theme to see professionally over the next 510, years. But point being marketers, top priorities and challenges in relation to AI are very similar right now. We will see how that changes over time, but the number one focus is implementing it and doing it so successfully. Okay, so then the third Bellwether event was the election that happened at the beginning of the month. So again, I put this together. Last I did this, I think I gave the presentation on the 12th, and I was trying to get the most up to date information before we did this. And I was looking since, and there hasn’t been much written since this time last week, but well, and I’m sure maybe everyone saw today but Trump’s pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his nomination today. That is relevant to us, because we do know in Donald Trump’s first term, Jeff Sessions was not a cannabis friendly Ag, and there were ramifications for that. So the Ag pick, as well as who’s going to head HHS and and these other departments that determine whether or not there’s going to be a change in cannabis policy moving forward, do matter, but we haven’t gotten there yet. But the point being, there was actually, this was an NPR report who said that Trump’s position on cannabis was actually very similar to Vice President Harris, and that he’s this is this quote is from the president elect. But I believe it is time to end needless arrest and incarcerations of adults for small amounts and marijuana. For personal use, we must also implement smart regulations while providing access for adults to safe, tested product. And when I was researching this, I looked up there was a quote from David Culver, who’s the Senior Vice President of Policy, or senior SVP of Public Affairs for the US cannabis Council, who many of you may know is one of the larger lobbying groups from our industry that represents some of the largest businesses and multi state operators, and he said he is optimistic that the new administration will take a similar approach to cannabis as the current administration. Colbert said, we didn’t see a lot of activity from President Trump, if any at all, on cannabis reform in his first term. But I think this time is going to be different, and Trump had said, as President, we will continue to focus on research to unlock the medical uses of marijuana, to a schedule free drug, and work with Congress to pass common sense laws, including safe banking for state authorized companies. So positive signs in that sense. And I also looked as cannabis mentioned in 20 project 2025 and it is not directly mentioned in Project 2025 but it does mention basically that what’s mentioned is related to drug policy is around fentanyl and addressing the Fentanyl crisis and reducing the number of overdoses and fatalities. So we will see how this plays out. Right? It’s not clear positive or negative, either way in terms of cannabis and our industry and how this plays out, but I think a lot will become clear around this administration in the first 100 days, honestly, even probably the first 30. And we’ll watch what happens with that. Ag post, so yes, to that point, these are some of the positions we want to look at in terms of an indication for how things might be for cannabis. Attorney General, who’s the head of HHS, which I don’t remember if they had nominated RFK at this point, but that is the current nomination, DEA FDA, and then Congress. Now we know that the House has landed in Republican control, even though it is narrow, but those are the areas where we want to keep an eye out the rescheduling hearing that was supposed to happen this summer, that was pushed to the fall, that was pushed to December, and is now pushed to 2025. Is still scheduled. They have done the review. They have gotten an enormous public input, which had, I think, last I checked, was overwhelming, 90% positive of the comments that went into the rescheduling review or for rescheduling to schedule three. But we will also need to look out for the influence of industries that have kind of their own agenda when it comes to cannabis legalization and what it may or may not look like. So some areas to look out for, but again, still very early with where we are here at the end of November to see what next year will mean.

Lisa Buffo  28:06

Okay, so moving on from those three Bellwether events, the cookie apocalypse, AI and marketing and the election, I wanted to look at some data that we had around the state of cannabis marketing, and I’m going to put an asterisk on this whole slide that these are early findings, so we’ve been doing our own survey follow up survey that we’ve done in years past on what are marketers spending? What’s the state of cannabis marketing from our membership? Now we don’t have enough responses that I would be happy with to call it a statistically significant response, so I’m tempering this with saying these are not likely going to be the final numbers, but we have a direction, and we do have, we do have enough responses, so we have a direction of where things are going. But this should get clear over the next few weeks. So right now, we still have a majority, well almost, actually, 44% is not a majority, but it’s close of marketers who have budgets of less than 5% of annual recurring revenue. Again, if we’re using that 7.7 number with Gartner, and that was their 2024 numbers, we will see how this plays out. We’re still indexing greatly below other industries, so not a surprise there again. We’ll have a little more detail on this, but overall less budget for marketers in cannabis. Moving forward, the top two areas of marketing spend are digital media and events. We’ve seen events rebound since the pandemic, of course, and one of my personal takes is, I actually think with the rise of AI, we are going to have a premium placed in a positive way on in person interaction, human human everything from a brand perspective, that customers, I think, will reward human behavior, human interaction, in person events over being targeted by ai ai generated digital content. So it will be interesting. To see the role that events play moving forward. We do know they have always had, I don’t want to say an outsized influence, but a large influence in the cannabis industry, given how much other channels are closed to us, but digital media and events continue to be top areas of marketing spend, and that hasn’t always been the case. We are actually saying an improvement here on this third data point, so 88% of marketers said their expectations have been met or exceeded in terms of difficulty educating customers on their products. In the past, that number has been a lot lower, and that’s been more of a struggle. So general direction again is we are seeing an improvement, where marketers are finding it easier to educate their customers. We can speculate on this each year that moves forward, the general cannabis education gets clearer. We get further away from the pure prohibition and propaganda days. It’s becoming more normalized. It’s becoming more less stigmatized, more routine, people are trying new things, and that is helping marketers on both sides. So yeah, so marketers are actually having a better time educating their customers on their products. Brand awareness and lead gen are still top marketing goals, so still top of funnel in terms of what marketers are going for, that has been a fairly consistent theme as long as we’ve been tracking and seeing this data is top of funnel, which is something we have talked about as a somewhat of a problem area within CMA, where, to some degree, marketers can almost over focus on that, where they under focus on loyalty within their customers, upselling to their customers, kind of rewarding those who have been there and been coming back, at the expense of just constantly filling the funnel. Not that that isn’t a worthy goal or it needs to happen, but that at the expense of loyalty and at the expense of engaging with your current customers, can have its trade offs, but we are seeing again, those are still top marketing goals as a whole across the board. And then lastly, that LinkedIn is the dominant social media platform. This has been the case for a while now, and we’re even seeing this with B to C brands. And that was something we had teased out with this survey. Was like, Is it B to B brands? Just using LinkedIn? Is it cannabis brands? But it is still the favored social media platform across the industry, across the board, and they do take they’re the most friendly we’ve seen to cannabis as a whole. Okay, so again, and we will drop the link to this survey at the end. Please fill it out. If you haven’t, we will send the report to everybody who takes it, and we will have this for our members as well, but it’s going to help us get better data to see where everyone stands and track what we’ve seen over time, but early direction, this is where things we’re seeing heading. And then I was also looking at what was the overall coverage of cannabis from media, mainstream media, what were the big headlines? What were, you know, how did, what was the sentiment around what was being reported on? And in some ways, more or less the same, where we’re seeing essentially more information come out. In both ways, we have more awareness around the positives or the ways that cannabis can help, but we also have more awareness around areas of risk or areas of concern or harm, so to speak. And we’re seeing coverage on both of those, so it’s not necessarily lopsided. I’ve also seen more information or more coverage around cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, which used to be like, sort of a fringe thing that we didn’t really understand or was talked about, that’s getting more coverage, that’s getting becoming more of a problem or more known. And then the same trend that we’re seeing in terms of cannabis, there is somewhat of a relationship between cannabis and alcohol consumption, where alcohol consumption is going down. And I’ve actually looked at, there’s a the Brewers Association. It’s like the US, US Brewers Association, which is based in Boulder, but they also collect data on consumption of beer. And I was looking at their data in relation to, you know, how is their industry changed over time, and I look at alcohol specifically, because our marketing regulations are actually pulled directly from alcohols in cannabis, they essentially just took alcohols and copied and pasted it over to cannabis, which, to some degree makes sense and others, is not the full picture. They’re very different substances. There’s no medical side to alcohol whatsoever. And there is the relationship from the substance to the person is different, right? You drink more alcohol, you get more drunk, you get less more out of control, less control. Cannabis isn’t that sort of one to one relationship. But point being, if you look. The data on alcohol that their industry is also tracking a decline in consumption, and we are seeing cannabis consumption go up. So overall trend in terms of how the media is covering cannabis, more coverage on the harms, more coverage on the positives and science on that side. And we are seeing this relationship in terms of what are our device substances, our daily substances, of choice, those attitudes changing too. And the last analogy, Oh, can you guys hear me? That Ai no taker. I don’t know if it’s that’s an automatic thing or somebody can’t hear me, but let me know, if not, okay, I hope so. Can someone give me the thumbs up that you can hear me? Okay? Thanks, Anastasia. I appreciate that. Where we are in cannabis is if, from a regulatory perspective, it would be like if we just had liquor stores, but no bars, which, if we think about like that, bars are so core to alcohol culture and how you engage with the substance and how you engage with others. Where we have dispensaries, but we don’t really have some states have this patchwork of consumption lounges, but there really isn’t that public place to consume or engage around it. So again, we are still really early, I think, in terms of cannabis and its impact socially and culturally and society, societally and where it fits in. But yeah, just wanted to sort of point that out. Okay, so for this part, I want to go over actually lessons learned from mainstream marketing. One of my personal business and marketing philosophies is we all have like style icons, spirit animals, like people we look up to. Who are our personal heroes, right? Who do we mimic, learn from, etc. I think you can do that in marketing and business as well. And I look at there are certain organizations I look at that are sort of analogous to CMA in terms of how they run their business, what they do that are much bigger, much better funded. And I will look at them and pay attention to what they’re doing and extrapolate lessons and apply them in my business. And same thing with marketing, I will look at other membership groups. How are they marketing? How are they talking to their customers? How are they talking to their members? What are their benefits?

Lisa Buffo  37:19

And I think marketing, and when it comes to campaigns, is similar, where everyone can benefit from having their their their spirit, marketer, their the company whose marketing they really like, whether it’s in their tone or their strategy. But mainstream marketing doesn’t have the budget or regulatory constrictions we have. And you might think like, Oh, why would I look at these massive, multi million or billion corporations and get inspired from them? Well, that’s because they have disposable resources and income. So they are investing millions in research and development. They are investing millions into creative direction. They are investing millions into strategy. And while that will be at a really scaled up version, there’s data and thought put into that they don’t make decisions in a vacuum. And so if you kind of look at what they’re doing and studying and study it and look behind the curtain, you might get some lessons that can apply to your small business without you having to go spend that money or you going to have to do that. So I like to just see what mainstream media marketers are doing, and kind of pick it apart myself, and look at it super bowl style, how we all do like, Oh, this is a commercial I loved. Why did you like that? Why did it stick out to you? And do it throughout the year, and this time of year is like, similar to the Super Bowl where we’re in holiday season. This is where everyone spends all their money. You know, these campaigns have been planned at least a year or so out, and now they’re finally being executed on, because this is when all the largely consumer spending happens, is the these five or six weeks. So I’m going to look at a few mainstream marketing campaigns with you, show you my interpretation, some lessons I learned, and you can come to your own conclusions, but wanted to do that. So this one, did anybody see this ad during the election? So during the election, calm, which is an app like, essentially meditation app, it does what it says. It’s there to calm you down. They bought an ad that was just 30 seconds of silence, a TV commercial. So during the election, which was genius, because that Tuesday was a very high energy day for folks across the board. It was, it was heavy in the air. There was a lot going on, and they knew that, and they capitalized on that. And whenever there’s heightened intensity like that, people remember those days, right? Like you remember where you were on National Days of intensity, so to speak, positive and negative. So they bought an advertisement that was 30 seconds of silence. And so they’re the genius to this, in my mind, is that they created, they did experiential marketing in a channel that is not. Experiential, which is television. TV is normally being talked at it’s it’s push marketing, right? Like you’re receiving these messages. They’re talking at you. They’re giving you your pitch. I cannot stand commercials. I always mute them. I hate listening to them. It feels like really aggressive and invasive. And the commercials generally talk fast. They don’t really say anything interesting, but they’re just pushing, pushing, pushing their product. They did. They created an experience by having no sound. It made you stop and understand, oh, this is what this is what I’m receiving. This is what this product actually does. I’m having an experience reflective of the this app and this product, which is a moment of peace and silence, but also you’re used to your TV making noise. So if you’re up and you’re cooking or you’re, you know, kind of passively paying attention, and all of a sudden the TV goes quiet, you would probably think something happened and like, turn around and look and be like, Wait, why did it go quiet? I didn’t mute it. So it actually captures your attention by doing the opposite of what TV commercials normally do. So that was brilliant, and that, I mean, this looks like a canvas slide. They didn’t have to spend all this money on a 32nd ad. They just created silence. They did it at the right time, the right place, and they created an experience in a channel that is not really designed for experiential marketing. So the takeaway there is, I thought, for cannabis marketers, how can you plan on things that are coming up that you know everyone is going to experience, and sort of insert your message in some really creative way? And also, how can you hack or cross collaborate and create again, like experiential marketing on a platform that is not designed for experiential marketing. That alone, I thought was the genius in this ad, for many other reasons, but also just spoke to the real creativity of their team, and it took you. I know what Kong does now, right there. That’s what they want, silence. They give you silence. They give you peace. And that, yes, so that was like two weeks ago, three weeks ago, whenever the election was. Another one is Wesson. So cooking oil, not a sexy product, so to speak. But Thanksgiving is coming up, right? So make sense, this would be a time that they would do some marketing. So they recast. They did a few things here. They recast gender roles in this campaign by positioning men as the family chef. And what the brand says is a first for its marketing. We do know historically that home products, it’s mom recommends this. There’s women doing the cleaning, women doing the laundry. All that has had mom at the helm of it cooking, that they’ve had women be the spokespeople for that which does play into stereotypical gender roles, which is conversation I think we’ve been having as a society for some time now, but Weston sort of consciously took that and ran with it by flipping the script on its head and having men be the head chefs and really speaking to that so and if you look at what they’re doing from a business perspective, it is smart, we know, and there’s lots of data that a younger audience, millennials and Gen Z shop from a very values aligned perspective. They want their brands to have be political. They want their brands to have advocacy positions. They want their brands to stand for something. They will reward companies who do that and and punish companies who don’t or who are on the wrong side of their values and beliefs. So Wesson did this in an appeal to help the brand appeal to a broader customer base. So they made somewhat of a political statement, and I’ll just say political, for lack of a better word, but they made a value statement about their company and what they stand for. They made something that stood out, that made you think, Oh, I’m not used to seeing that in an ad. And they found a creative way to do it at the right time, in the right place, November, election season, around the holidays, and advertise something that is normally a pretty boring thing to advertise, I would imagine. So that’s something that Wesson did recently, and you can still see these out up now. Spotify. This is not news, but I still love this campaign, and like to bring it up, because this is where they essentially took consumer data and made it really appealing by giving it back to the customer. So Spotify grabbed in the legend here is that this was actually an interns idea years ago that ended up making its way to the top, becoming a thing, and it was an immediate hit, and we’re all about to get this soon on our Spotify. I’m pretty sure it comes out December 1. So if you use Spotify, I use Spotify, we’re going to get all this information. Who are our top artists, our top songs, what is your listening personality? They give you social media templates so you can share it, and everything I see on Instagram story that. Week is people Spotify wrapped bragging about who they love, what they like, et cetera. But they are making customer data, which in some way has been, I don’t want to say a taboo topic, but it can be a little creepy when it’s like, oh my gosh, this company knows a lot about me, and they’re targeting me and like they do all that, but Spotify made it. They almost gamified it, where they made it fun and interesting and engaging, and have their their customers, promote them themselves, and them as being Spotify, where they’re sharing. Look at this platform I’m on and look at all this time I have spent on it like, Could you imagine if we got an Instagram wrapped and it was like, you spent this many hours on our social platform engaging with this type of content like that could be a hit. And granted, this is music, which is art, so there’s a little bit of a personality kick to this. But I have always thought it would be really interesting if a cannabis company did a campaign like this, like I go to the same dispensary, I’m I buy more or less the same products. I like to try new things, because this is our space, our industry. I like doing that, but I would find it very interesting and cool if someone was like, here’s everything you bought from us, and you’re this type of consumer, and you like these products, and maybe you should try these and almost making their data a campaign within itself. There’s different ways that can be extrapolated. But again, they don’t have to reinvent this. It happens every single year. It is a hit every year. People look forward to it, and they’re not sitting at the creative drawing table every summer, like, what are we going to do this fall? So Spotify wrapped. Um, okay, Does anyone see this one? I know we’re coming up on time, so I’m going to get through the rest pretty quickly, but this is the big chicken. So this is a play on the Whopper. So McDonald’s? I’m not a McDonald’s consumer. It’s not my style of food, but the Whopper has been there. Is it the Whopper? No, the Big Mac. I’m confusing McDonald’s and Burger King. Which one is McDonald’s, the Big Mac is the Big Mac. So McDonald’s has the Big Mac. That is their flagship burger. That’s their flagship product, so to speak. And beef has been McDonald’s things. They’re

Lisa Buffo  47:14

McDonald’s burgers, fries, that’s what they sell. And beef has been their number one protein that they have sold historically and over the years, and everyone knows a Big Mac the same everywhere you go. So that’s their flagship product. This year, they remixed it and made the big chicken, which is essentially a Big Mac with fried chicken versus beef. And it had mixed reviews online, like, if you look up, how did people receive the big chicken? Some people loved it. Some people hated, but what it did was elevate the category of chicken, and now McDonald’s sales of chicken are on par with beef. And that was not the case. It was beef, chicken, fish, I don’t know, ribs, whatever else they sell, but beef was by and far number one. Now it is even with chicken. So even though this product Some people love, some people hated. Interpret that what you will. In some ways, I think that is a success, but it elevated the category of chicken which means more people are ordering chicken nuggets, they’re ordering the grilled chicken sandwich. They’re ordering those other things. So again, they took something that was loved and remixed it and created more customer loyalty, more customer engagement. If I was a McDonald’s customer, I would imagine I would go and try this for the sake of trying something new. Because when does a fast food restaurant really come out with anything kind of new or innovative? But they did, and it really helped their business this year. So the big chicken at McDonald’s, and again, for cannabis companies, do you have a flagship product that you could remix? Do you have something where you can sort of remix a classic to elevate a category or elevate something else that you know is already tried and true and works, but give your customers something to talk about, give them something to come in and try and try that marketing playbook and see what happens? Okay, so to wrap it up, based on all that information we talked about, the bellwether events in the that happened this year in 2024 we talked about some data we saw in marketing outside of the industry, data that early data that we’re seeing in marketing within the industry, from CMA, we looked at some mainstream marketing campaigns, extrapolated some takeaways from cannabis. So I just want to give my overall perspective and thoughts this one I’ve already mentioned. But I do think as digital experiences become more AI and algorithm driven, a premium is going to be placed on in person events in human connection. I strongly think this is going to be the case. We will see. But we are ultimately humans with human needs, who want to connect with high emotional needs, and who place a premium on our emotional connection with brands, whether it’s really conscious or not. I do think that element of showing more human side is going to be a change from kind of the direction business and marketing has been going over the last 25 or 30 years as a whole. Yeah. With the election in the new administration, we will see how this plays out. There has been a lot of talk of implementing of tariffs, and if that happens, prices would go up in the US economy. And we do know cannabis is recession proof. We saw that really play out with the pandemic, where people buy cannabis when times are good, day by cannabis when times are bad. However, it is still dependent on how much disposable income they have, or income as a whole. We may struggle. If the economy destabilizes, we’ll have other problems if that happens, but to be seen, and did just want to mention it in context here, that even though we are our own industry, we do our own thing to some degree, and in some way, are siloed from the rest of the world. We’re also not, and we’re still a part of the US economy, and we’re still a part of all the factors, political, social that happen around us, and depending on what happens in many different ways, next year, we may or may not have a good or bad year, I also think again, a continuation of what we’ve seen, and we’ve talked about this in CMA events, from the summit, from future of cannabis marketing and marketing spaces in arenas that companies that are principled in position will fare better long term, not only with young people, millennials and Gen Z, but I think as we Get into a more stratified political environment that companies who are aware of this and tackle this will essentially be better positioned and continue this trend of values based shopping. So a few ways to think about this or prepare to just take that to the next level. Discuss your company values as we get into a possibly controversial time period. Where do you stand? What do you support? You know people’s rights have been changing and at stake. How do you respond and answer to that? Do you at all? How do you answer to customers? This is a time where you would rather be prepared than not. So have those conversations. This also helps you align internally with your own team and your own company culture. So if you haven’t already done that, if this hasn’t come up in the last four or five years, do that now the time, the time was yesterday, but the time is now. If you haven’t find out what your customers think and want actually talk to them. Don’t make assumptions, but talk to them. You can do focus groups. You can ask them at the point of sale. You can send them DMS on social media. You can do surveys. You can do mystery shopping, but actually talk with your customers, and don’t the like middle school thing of like, when you assume you make an ass out of you and me is funny, but it is also true, they will tell you. They will tell you, talk with your customers, find out what they want, need and like, don’t hesitate or shy away from those conversations. They are there, and they are going to be your source of truth. For AI, we’ve talked about it, but, um, something is not a data point I brought up here, but I’ve seen and talked about in presentations past, is that one of the biggest concerns around AI internally, is employees attitude towards it in relation to their employer? AKA, is their job safe? Are they going to be rewarded for implementing AI? Are they going to be punished if they make themselves obsolete or don’t need to spend 40 hours a week doing what they were doing? Have a plan for that, and talk with your team about your own company thoughts and beliefs around AI. How can they leverage it? How safe are their jobs? However you want to handle that, but it is a concern. There is data around this, so you need to have a business plan and an HR plan, not just a strategic plan that we’re we want AI to write our blog posts, but you need to do that and then say, how does that affect our content writers? How are we going to talk to them about it now, and how do we want them to approach it philosophically and in terms of their own training? Do that, and then lastly, shore up your crisis. Public Relations plans in controversial times, companies can make rape mistakes that can sink them. Bud Light is an example. Take that. Take with that what you will. But there is a script for crisis PR and pretending like it’s not a crisis, pretending like it doesn’t exist, pretending like you don’t know what happened, or blaming pointing fingers in leadership and firing people. You can do all that, but there’s better ways to do crisis PR if you don’t have a crisis PR plan, create one the general summary of it is a three R’s, regret, recompense, recompense, recon, recompense and reform. Own the mistake. Say what you’re going to do about it, and do it and take those next steps. You don’t want to get caught flat footed. Crisis can happen all the time. No matter what is happening societally, you could have a product recall. You could misprint something, something could happen. You never know, but have a crisis. PR plan, if you don’t already, now is the time to do it and make sure you have it written out and articulated, and that your team knows you.

Lisa Buffo  55:00

That was our state of cannabis marketing in 2024 thank you all for listening. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel and check us out at the Cannabis Marketing association.com if you have any questions about joining, please email us membership at marketing cannabis.org and we’re happy to get on a call with you and talk about how CMA can help meet your needs. Have a great Thanksgiving, everybody, and we’ll see you at the next episode. You.