How long can we pass on grass?

Money is pouring into cannabis advertising budgets. It’s getting harder for publishers to just say no.

If you’re going to get into marijuana marketing in the United States, you’d better be ready to navigate a patchwork of restrictions that make advertising cannabis so tricky. In Denver, Colo., for example, cannabis is legal, but some metro area towns don’t want to cross that double yellow line.

Navigating publisher pages used to be just as hard. Just six years ago, cannabis ads were relegated to niche magazines, like High Times and Leafly. But now that ad money is flowing, publishers are looking for reasons to allow cannabis advertising onto their pages — as long as it doesn’t rile their other advertisers.

To start, more places are moving toward legalization. Canada legalized marijuana in 2018 and it’s only completely illegal in six U.S. states. Now, there’s talk about a Democratically controlled White House decriminalizing the Schedule I drug in the United States.

“You could have a billboard on one side of the road, and it’s legal, but the billboard on the other side of the road is not legal. That’s just part of the game of cannabis marketing.” — Johnathan McFarlane, director of strategy at Hybrid Marketing Co.

The growing ranks of legal marijuana users are inspiring the unlocking of new ad inventory. “There’s such a wide range of people who use these days,” says John Shute, CEO of cannabis marketing agency PufCreativ. Women and adults over 45, “who haven’t used cannabis for years but are excited to now” are among them, said Vee Popat, founder and cannabis strategist at ColaDigital in Canada.

Cannabis marketers can now move beyond Mary Jane mainstays and run programmatic campaigns on mainstream sites using partners including StackAdapt, Trigger Digital, and smaller ad networks like Mantis and TrafficRoots. Hybrid Marketing Co.’s campaigns, for example, have appeared on CNN.com.

“Those [media] organizations, they don’t want to shut down the competition for their inventory,” McFarlane says. “The more competition there is, the higher the price they can charge.”

Shute has seen cannabis ads in LA Magazine, and says that “a lot of our PR partners are getting [publicity] in some of the biggest nationally known magazines.” That, however, is usually for hemp products that don’t contain the narcotic compound THC, which gives marijuana its buzzy effect.

Ultimately, a lot of digital cannabis advertising comes down to local regulations. You won’t see an ad for marijuana on CNN.com if you live in New York, a state where weed isn’t legal, but you might in Colorado. States including Pennsylvania and Ohio are among the least open to cannabis content.

Still “brand safety,” continues to influence publishers and platforms thinking about opening up to cannabis advertising. “Everyone was so worried about their ads not showing up next to beheading videos that they went to this rush to whitelist,” says Jon Cappetta, vp of content at High Times. “Platforms are just so worried about protecting the kids that they don’t want to take the money yet.”

In Colorado, for example, for a cannabis brand to advertise on a platform, it must “guarantee that at least 71 percent of the audience is over 21,” says Cappetta. That data is easy enough for digital publications, but less so for print.

Overall, while “different magazines and other advertising solutions are becoming more lenient,” says Shute, “they all have different sets of…rules that apply to different ad campaigns.” Shute gets inquiries almost daily about cannabis brands getting their Facebook ad accounts shut down, .often for small things — like using the term “THC” in their metadata.

Other advertisers can also get prickly around cannabis. Hybrid Marketing Co. runs a separate portion of their business called 4B, which is not associated with the cannabis industry. Their clients include “large, established tech companies,” says McFarlane, that want nothing to do with marijuana. “The stigma definitely still exists, for businesses, advertisers — just in general.”

But that stigma is dissipating and will continue to as legalization continues apace. Atria’s $1.8 million investment in the industry seems huge, says Cappetta, but “it’s going to be $200 billion the day legalization happens” in the U.S. “Major brands” that he wouldn’t name are talking with High Times about getting into the cannabis, which will only push more sites to open their advertising inventory to cannabis marketers.

“I do see the advertising restrictions being changed in a positive way for cannabis companies in the next two to five years,” says Popat.

“There’s definitely tons of interest in the ‘green rush,’” adds Cappetta. “People think that there’s just gold pouring out of the walls.”