Marijuana Advertising = New Client Category
It’s a brave new world. Leafly, a cool new marijuana information website and app, just ran a $200,000 full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times. Here is Leafly itself on their ad, Leafly Places Nation’s First Consumer Cannabis Advertisement in The New York Times. Keep your eye on this category. It’s blowing up.
By the way, Did Leafly get it right?
This is the New York Times ad. Does it work? Yes and no.
Yes, because Leafly had the cajones to run the ad. It puts them on the map and the ad delivers a leadership position via the ad placement in our leading national newspaper. Their message is New York centric as it congratulates New York on its Compassionate Care Act.
The ad fails because its casting is amateurish. The use of two (too) cute twenty-something New Yorkers just doesn’t’ work. The guy with MS, OK, I might believe that. But, identifying Molly, an athletic runner, as a person who needs, needs, pot to cure her pain, is ridiculous. What a missed opportunity to show what is really going on in the world of medical marijuana… it works for women like Molly’s mom too.
I have to fault Leafly for acting a bit like a too well-funded 2000 Internet boom start-up. Remember those silly days when twenty-something start-up CEO’s tossed millions at Super Bowl ads? Remember the Pets.com sock puppet?
