It has been well documented that women and minorities are vastly underrepresented in the cannabis industry. While most may assume this applies only to cultivation facilities and dispensaries, the truth is that the problem stretches into ancillary businesses as well, such as advertising and marketing agencies, according to Rebecca Brown, founder of the Canadian cannabis advertising agency Crowns.
Brown says the lack of diversity in creative agencies is bad for the industry because “it’s guaranteed to result in advertising that will miss the mark and offend people who aren’t you, which is a lot of people.”
Instead, Brown, a former content chief and social media marketing veteran at marketing communications company J. Walter Thompson Canada, says the diversity of the cannabis customer should be reflected in the makeup of the agencies who are marketing to them.
This is what led to her launching Crowns, a women-led, data-driven agency serving the global cannabis industry. The business aims to help North American cannabis businesses build brands, tell stories and reach customers. Its goal is to be ethical, increase industry diversity and encourage competition in the cannabis industry while creating a global blueprint for cannabis advertising and agencies that can translate into other countries as they legalize, Brown says.
“[Crowns] is a way in for a female-led entity to profit from the space, to hire other diverse people to the space and … to ensure that the voices that are building the brands that will be consumed by women and other diverse customers represent the diversity of the marketplace,” she says.
To achieve its goals, Crowns—which already has clients in Canada and California and wants to support companies that have diverse leadership and that are licensed as part of California’s cannabis equity programs—had to buck traditional wisdom.
A New Approach
While most advertising agencies have a set staff and a billed-hours money model, Crowns has adopted a different practice.
“Our core team… is lean and their skillsets are strategy, analysis and project management, and they’re experts in … cannabis regulations and in cannabis business,” Brown says. “We use those people to … deeply understand business needs and the business problem that we’re trying to solve for customer or client, … and then we put together teams who really are the best assortment and a diverse assortment of creative problem solvers to solve that.”
For example, one of Crowns’ clients aspires to produce a craft product while being “mass craft;” that is, feeling like a craft product but having a mass audience. In this instance, Crowns built a creative team of business leaders from the craft beer industry who have experience building craft brands to act as consultants for the client. The craft beer executives were paired with people who have more traditional advertising and creative backgrounds, as well as someone familiar with online publishing, which is a more open avenue than traditional advertising for cannabis companies, according to Brown. The teams are exclusive to each client and the senior thinkers are part of Crowns’ network, although not on Crowns’ permanent staff, Brown says.
These unique problem-solving and brand-building teams then follow a scrum model, Brown says, which is a methodology from the software development industry. In this model, the team works intensely for a short period of time. At the end of the period, it must provide the client a draft of ideas, such as an advertising campaign or a logo.
Crowns does not have a set billing model, but is experimenting with different approaches, using billed hours, billed hours offset by equity and other solutions, depending on each unique instance, Brown says.
“It’s very different from how traditional agency models work, and it’s why on our advisory, we have people who are creators and creative, but who are creative in diverse ways,” she says.
Crowns’ advisory board includes cannabis culturalist Precious Chong (daughter of Tommy Chong), Shutterstock’s Mindy Loverin (specializing in visual content) and Umbra’s Paul Rowan (specializing in design).
Crowns has also formed partnerships with consulting firm Cannabis Compliance Inc. to help navigate regulations and digital performance agency Abacus and create cannabis-specific customer data and targeting products.
Abacus focuses on performance and conversion metrics using Facebook, Brown says, and can help Crowns analyze data performance and patterning. Crowns and Abacus are working together to create a media product that will help licensed producers reach their target customer and maintain contact across the entire path to purchase, Brown says, which will help producers better understand their customers.
“It’s critically important that everyone who works for us knows regulation backwards and forwards,” Brown says. “You can’t move quickly in this space and seize opportunity if you don’t understand that or if you’re putting forward ideas to clients that can’t work. So, Cannabis Compliance Inc., as the global expert in that space—we rely on them to make sure that we are up to snuff and know our stuff.”
Crowns employees are very familiar with the Government of Canada’s Proposed Approach to the Regulation of Cannabis and Prop. 64, Brown says, and there is a constant and ongoing discussion and education surrounding regulations as the rules and the interpretation of them will continue to evolve.
Building Global Brands
Crowns’ mission is to not only expand diversity and competition in the cannabis industry, but also to help advance the brands that have staying power to become globally recognized.
“We don’t have a massive population, so it’s very, very unusual for … Canadian business to be in a situation where we really are leading the world [in] a new industry and creating, in all likelihood, the brands that will become global brands,” Brown says.
While the Cannabis Act that will regulate adult-use marijuana when it becomes legal in Canada this summer is not yet in effect, Crowns has been advising its clients to have a clear idea of the fundamentals of their brand—who the customer is, who the company’s team is, what they stand for and what their story is.
“You’re going to have to figure out how you iterate that—how you communicate that—through the cracks and the constraints and the avenues that will exist inside of regulations,” Brown says.
And solidly built brands that can promote themselves within one market’s regulations have a better chance of translating themselves into other markets. Crowns is helping California businesses with the desire to expand globally to become licensed in Canada, which will be a gateway to import and export.
While California-based businesses are currently telling their stories through word of mouth, on-site advertising and products, Brown says, “Those tactics and executions can’t happen [in Canada] because the way that we’re regulated, the packaging is uniform, we don’t know what kind of access you’ll have to budtenders to build those relationships and there will be no or very little on-premise execution,” she says. “So, they have to figure out how to translate the fundamentals of their brand that have been successful and amplify them and reach people with that idea in ways that they haven’t yet explored.”
Successful brands will remain focused on their brand story, knowing how they are different and what their customer looks like, and they will not diverge from that, Brown adds.
“[In Canada], when rec is listed to the consumer, … it will be this crazy cacophony of voices, and it will be very hard to tell one apart from the other,” she says. “The industry experts are predicting that there will be mass consolidation of brands within the first couple of years. … In order to succeed globally, [brands] have to succeed here first, and so they have to compete inside of that noise and what really will be a brand.”
Top photo by Doug Izon. From left to right: Mindy Loverin, Rebecca Brown and Precious Chong.
Melissa Schiller
