Cannabis Advertising Platforms and Cannabis Digital Ads: What You Need to Know

Edibles? Pre-rolls? Flower?

Whatever your customers want to buy, reaching them through digital advertising can seem difficult, especially if you’re researching traditional tech solutions. But with the right strategy and the right cannabis advertising platform, you can advertise to new and existing consumers across websites and mobile apps and drive real results, whether you want to build brand awareness, increase in-store foot traffic, or drive ecommerce sales.

It all comes down to choosing the right cannabis advertising platform. Here are five key topics to cover as you research what solution is right for your business:

1. Cannabis Advertising Compliance and Methodology

Cannabis digital ads have to be compliant with all of today’s local and federal regulations. There are 19 states and two territories in the US that have fully legalized cannabis. There are eight medical markets, two with decriminalized markets, and four states that still treat cannabis as entirely illegal. Specific compliance guidelines can vary by state, but there are three key federal regulations in place:

- Advertising must not appeal to minors.

- Businesses must not advertise or promote in a manner that is false, untrue, or tends to create a misleading impression as to the effects on the health of cannabis consumption.

- Businesses must not advertise where less than 90 percent of the audience for the advertisement is reasonably expected to be 21 years of age or older, based on reliable evidence.

When you’re evaluating cannabis advertising platforms, compliance should come first. Ask potential vendors how they monitor for compliance and what makes their approach bullet-proof.

Usually, compliant cannabis digital ads are made possible by a platform’s dataset and audience targeting capabilities. If you’re creating digital ads, the ads should be served only to people who are 21 and over. Investigate the methodology of each cannabis advertising platform you consider to ensure that compliance is top-of-mind.

2. Inventory, Supply, and Publishers for Cannabis Digital Ads

If you are planning a cannabis digital ad campaign, find out where your ads are going to be served to your audience. If you hear the terms “inventory,” “supply,” or “publishers,” in the world of advertising technology, this all means the same thing: websites and apps.

As you’re evaluating your choices, your cannabis digital advertising platform should provide a broad list of online websites, news publications, and mobile apps that can be reached with the platform.

A cannabis digital advertising platform like Surfside, which combines the power of a customer data platform (CDP) and a demand side platform (DSP), connects a client’s first-party customer data sources and works with traditional ad exchanges and premium publishers to really understand your customers and potential customers. With access to mainstream publishers and ad exchanges, your cannabis digital ads can appear on more than 1 million popular websites and apps.

3. The Cannabis Ad Creative and Design Process

There is a lot of technology that goes into serving compliant cannabis digital ads across websites and apps, but making ads that look good - and drive consumers to engage - is a big part of the equation.

When researching cannabis ad platforms, ask potential partners about the ad creative design process. Make sure to cover:

- Does your team have to design the ads?

- Does the partner have an in-house team that can help?

- What capabilities are available from the platform to optimize ad creative?

- What formats and rich media ads are available?

There are many different types of cannabis digital ads, including dynamic ads such as video, product scroller, store locator, countdown, animations, and tap-to-call, as well as ads with rich media elements that personalize the content based on variables like location, custom audiences, time of day, weather, and more. A cannabis advertising platform should provide the option to choose what’s best for your business.

4. Audience Targeting Capabilities for the Right Cannabis Consumers

An “audience” for your ads is a group of customers or potential customers. Advertisers define an audience by factors like a shared location, shared product preference, or demographic data.

Finding the right audience targeting solution means understanding how the audience is created and defined. Some cannabis ad platforms offer preset segments of known cannabis consumers. This makes selecting an audience easy, but you may end up advertising to the same group of prospects as your competitors.

At Surfside, we believe that custom audiences and lookalike audiences generate the best value for cannabis companies, especially when combined with first-party data from different customer touchpoints.

Lookalike Audiences share the same attributes as your high-value customers, making it more likely that they will engage with cannabis ads and make a purchase.

Custom Audiences use a combination of first and third-party data to create groups of potential customers tailored to specific behaviors, locations, demographics, interests, and purchase habits.

5. Performance and Measurement for Cannabis Advertising Campaigns

A cannabis ad platform should be able to track your ads all the way back to sales, rather than just high-level metrics like clicks. This way, you can truly understand whether your campaign is driving the results you need - and how your ad budget is performing.

This starts with finding a cannabis advertising platform that can connect your data sources, like your website, ecommerce platform, and point-of-sale system back to the performance of the campaign to ensure accurate reporting.

With features like The Surfside Reporting Dashboard, the Surfside Platform offers access to real-time data about each campaign, from foot traffic and ecommerce activity to return on ad spend and total media spend.

Putting Cannabis Data at the Center

Cannabis advertising platforms like Surfside are built to be both a customer data platform and a demand side platform. By simplifying how clients activate the first-party data from websites, ecommerce platforms, and point-of-sale systems, we help cannabis businesses of all sizes run digital ad campaigns and measure ad performance across both online and offline sales.

Whichever cannabis advertising platform you choose, it should all start with your data. By putting data at the center of each cannabis ad campaign, you can ensure that the right consumers are targeted with the best possible ad experiences - and the results are tracked accurately from start to finish.

Want to learn more about what cannabis advertising platforms can do for you? Register for a demo with Surfside to see a cannabis advertising platform in action.