How to Make Product Placements Work for Your Cannabis Brand
Because cannabis is still federally illegal, traditional media buying for weed brands comes with a great deal of restrictions and limitations, even with Twitter’s slightly more lenient, updated advertising rules for brands in legal market states. However, a promising alternative and workaround for impactful advertising and marketing for cannabis companies can come in the form of product placements. Product placement (also known as embedded marketing), long a staple of film, television and even music, involves branded items being featured in a production, often implicitly or as part of the piece of art’s narrative. So how can a cannabis company effectively pursue and secure screen time and/or well-thought-out cameos as part of its strategy? Keys to this include understanding the different types of product placements, identifying your brand’s target audience and determining if this initiative should be pursued by an in-house team member or an outside agency.
Two Main Types of Product Placements: Paid and Organic
Organic placements are essentially well-orchestrated “freebies” — but in the real world, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Brands and cannabis enterprises can negotiate a quid-pro-quo system with content creators to create an in-feed experience for their potential audience, but there is less control over how the brand will be portrayed and the potential return on investment can be shrouded in mystery. Organic placements are typically negotiated directly with the creators working on various aspects of the production, such as set design or costume design, or even directors and writers. But there’s often no guarantee that this product placement will fit creatively into the production, reach the right audience or even be included in the final cut.
But with a paid placement strategy, companies and brands can work directly with the movie studio, television/streaming network or record label (never forget Drake’s artistic cameo on Draft Day — “And I gotta tell him chill, Sprite got me on payroll”). The negotiating corporate entity designs a contract with rates and other agreed-upon stipulations. While these guarantees cannot fully ensure the featured brand’s return on investment, it certainly helps legitimize product placement reliability, allowing the brand to make more informed decisions related to product placement in the future by tracking results.
Organic may be the best move when it comes to grocery shopping, but it’s not necessarily the most effective form of product placement.
Who’s Watching Your Brand? Identifying Your Target Audience
Cannabis on screen is no longer reserved for niche characters, like the stoner teen or aimless twenty-something. For instance, Netflix’s Dead to Me is set in California and features two forty-something women (played by Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini), and there are scenes in which the two speak openly and casually about consuming.
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It would be a real coupe for a cannabis brand targeting professional women interested in health and wellness to secure a product placement or mention in a globally known show like Dead to Me. However, it would make less sense for a brand targeting an audience interested in skate or hip-hop culture to pursue a placement in Dead to Me, but brands with those aesthetics and inspirations have a myriad of other entertainment options to choose from, as do cannabis brands that market themselves as “luxury.” Perhaps the latter style of brand should pursue a product placement in a show like Succession at one of character Kendall Roy’s parties. Granted, these are ambitious product placement aspirations, but these examples serve to illustrate the content possibilities and wide-reaching potential for cannabis brand product placements.
And of course, it’s important to consider and look towards the growing crop of reality and competition shows that involve cannabis, such as Bong Appetit and Cooked with Cannabis, among others.
How to Secure Product Placement Deals
Even once you have a thorough understanding of the different types of product placements and which opportunities would best reach your target audience, product placement deals just won’t fall into your lap. Professionals dedicated to pursuing these placements and establishing relationships for future partnerships are needed. Large companies may benefit from having an in-house team member (or multiple members) whose sole job is the pursuit of product placements, while smaller companies can opt to work with an outside agency, which may be more sustainable and cost-effective in the long run. Examine your company’s budget, needs, goals and current staff, as every business is different—there’s no one-size-fits-all approach here.
A recent report found that global product placement revenue was surging consistently in 2021 and 2022, so cannabis brands shouldn’t hesitate to leverage this promising advertising and marketing strategy. And as cannabis continues to be integrated into mainstream pop and lifestyle culture, reaching more demographics than ever before, product placements will likely become ubiquitous for savvy and forward-thinking cannabis brands.