advertising
Marijuana Advertising
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?
D&AD Most Awarded 2014 – Videos
This year’s awards for videos… wonderful stuff. Almost makes me want to buy things.
Magazines & Advertising Agencies Are Doing Marijuana
A friend recently gave me two copies of Northwest Leaf, the Pacific Northwest’s leading medical marijuana magazine. Get this: four-year-old Northwest Leaf ‘s May 2014 issue is 104 pages of jam-packed original content and … an unbelievable amount of marijuana industry advertising. Its monthly circulation is 30,000. Check out the issue here.
Should Magazines Be Doing Marijuana?
Should they? Well, you are some of the last people that I have tell that the print publication industry’s circulation and advertising are in steep decline. The FIPP World Magazine Trends 2013-14 chart (sorry about the fuzziness) shows what the future has in store for the print industry. Clearly no big news here.
The big(ist) news for me is that that the marijuana industry is driving the fast-paced growth of a local publication in a state where one of its major daily newspapers shut down a couple of years ago. There is so much interest in this new advertising category that the publisher of Northwest Leaf will be launching Oregon Leaf in July. How many print publishers are launching new publications in these digital times? Not too many.
Should Advertising Agencies Be Doing Marijuana?
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Google Trends On Advertising & Social Media
Google Trends offers a sweet barometric look at the relationship between “advertising” and the growth of “social media” as search terms. While it shouldn’t be surprising that interest in social media continues to grow, I am a bit amazed at how fast it seems to be overtaking advertising.
