Lights, Camera, Cannabis: Amplify Your Brand with CTV

{}Introduction

Jake Litke: Hello everyone, welcome to another installment of Cannabis Marketing Live, I am your host, Jake Litke. Today we have Andrew Roseman on the show, we're going to be talking about CTV, connected TV — but before we get into that, Andrew, maybe you could give us a quick bio, you've been working in CTV for a while, and advertising as a whole, but tell us how you found yourself here today, whether you're happy about it or not.

Andrew Roseman: Well, I had a bag thrown over my head and was put in the back of a van, and I found myself here at this podcast — perfect, no, I'm thrilled to be here. Andrew Roseman, president of Arise Communications, founded the company in 2005, so we're going into our 20th year. I was a big agency guy, and was really fortunate to start working on Advanced TV, what was called Advanced TV or addressable TV, in the earlier part of the 21st century — went out of agency, started building up these platforms at places like Comcast and Rogers, and other places, really enjoying that work, and now we're much more on the media side, focused around media with a public purpose, doing a lot of work for institutions and governments, getting messaging out using Advanced TV that's beneficial to the public.

Jake Litke: That's great, well, thank you for that.

A Primer on Video Formats: OLV, CTV, and Acronym Soup

Jake Litke: And before we get into CTV, I always like to start with a little primer on video in general, because there are a lot of different formats, and people tend to use different terms that mean the same thing, or sometimes not the same thing — so we've got CTV, OTT, OLV, streaming, pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll — let's talk a little about the evolution of video as an ad format available in the programmatic space, because that's what we're talking about, not really linear TV, although in some cases it looks the same to consumers at this point, but for the digital programmatic stuff, maybe you could do a quick primer, so people don't get overly confused when we start throwing out acronyms.

Andrew Roseman: Can I give you a couple other acronyms?

Jake Litke: Sure, which ones did I miss?

Andrew Roseman: Well, clearly, FAST.

Jake Litke: Oh, yes, and VAST.

Andrew Roseman: FAST and VAST, right, cousins but not friends — and, you know, we should probably address AVOD, since that's two parts of the family.

Jake Litke: Yeah, you should address it, sure, where do you want to begin?

Andrew Roseman: I mean, in fact, one of the first things I did for the good folks at Comcast was build out an IP video advertising system back in 2006. You want to talk about the programmatic side — OLV, or online video, is anything showing up in your browser, in a player. Let's leave mobile on its own, in-app mobile versus mobile web — OLV to me is anything that's IP video in a player, in a browser, on your — great — and then connected TV is generally referring to something like a Samsung or LG, an actual television that either has smart TV functionality built in, embedded Roku or something, or has some sort of box connected to it, whether that's Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Google, whatever. So connected TV, when I think about it, is the actual physical device they're looking at, which can fall into OLV to a certain extent, because technically it's online, but usually when people refer to OLV versus CTV, there's a different delivery endpoint, and, subsequently, different pricing.

Jake Litke: Specifically, it's a different user agent too, if you really want to dig in and split hairs.

Why CTV Works: Multiple Viewers, One Impression

Andrew Roseman: I think the important thing to me about CTV has always been — this has been a bit of a holy grail — you're using all the great targeting and refinement and segmentation we use in online advertising, and delivering it to the largest screen in the house, with 100% viewability, 4K, high, stereo sound, high impact, and, generally, more than one person is watching at a time — so, just as a delivery format for branded messaging, until you're into fully immersive stuff, that's about as good as you're going to get.

Jake Litke: So that's an important point — there's a lot of times, when you're running an impression on CTV, if it's on the TV itself, there's going to be more than one person seeing the ad, so you're getting double, potentially triple, the impression value, even though the ad units themselves tend to cost more.

Andrew Roseman: I'd say the value of the impression — what's great is, now TV is transacting on an impression basis, people have been hoping for this a long time, so here we have it, you get an integer, a countable number — the important part, less than what the multiplier is, is 1.3 people who saw it, to me the value is sort of in the psychology of the family and the purchase influencer. Coming from automotive, like I did, there are some surprising things you learn — the number one influencer on new vehicle make and model purchase are children.

Jake Litke: Really?

Andrew Roseman: Yeah, so, it sounds odd when you first hear it, but the parents are usually going to come up with your consideration set — if you're not buying a Porsche 911, and not buying a minivan, okay, it'll be a sedan, and one of these particular brands — but when you get into, "hey, guys, what do we like the most," kids go on the test drives, and yes, the partner too, but, yeah, huge influence on new vehicle purchase, kids.

Jake Litke: So do you advertise to the kids?

Andrew Roseman: No, are you glad they're there to influence the purchase, absolutely, and it goes the same through every category — those additional people in the room, that's why TV works.

Household-Level Targeting vs. Traditional Linear Buys

Jake Litke: Yeah, that makes sense — and something you were referring to is, with traditional linear TV, this was generally bought on a DMA, or maybe a zip code basis, or sometimes just a city, where the ads run. The value you get with programmatic is you're now able to target specific households, and use either your first-party data, or third-party data sets, to serve impressions specifically to the people you want.

Andrew Roseman: True, and, in theory, it's more efficient, talking about it on a localized basis — when you were buying locally, you were buying the entire reach of whatever local asset you had. Now, in some ways that's good — if you're a furniture retailer with five locations in that service area, that's great, you're reaching lots of people — but if you're, let's say, a hospital, and you want people to choose to come to yours for these reasons, you've got the most specialists, you probably want to find a geo and stick with it, as well as households that may be in need of it — not the best example.

Jake Litke: Yeah, I think more like, if you've got a product targeted to a specific cohort of people, whether based on gender, income, or something else — if you've got 100,000 people in the market, but really only 50,000 of them can be your customers, this gives you the ability to push your budget towards people in your desired audience, and not have the dreaded wasted impressions.

The Waste Debate: Dove Men and the Riding Mower Example

Jake Litke: Okay, so I'm going to be a little bit of a devil's advocate.

Andrew Roseman: Okay, good, let's do it.

Jake Litke: Just because I can be, and it's actually not my example, it comes from a really bright fellow who worked for Unilever — you can think of it one way, or think of it as brand building. The example was, the Dove brand was always very focused around women, that was very much their thing, and, not so long ago, they launched an extension into Dove Men. Now, you can say all those decades of Dove advertising, intended for women to respond to, was wasted on every man who saw it, or you can say that Dove brand established itself with those potential customers, and made it possible for a multi-billion dollar brand extension to happen somewhat overnight, because it was already launched — so it depends on how you view waste. If you're selling a riding lawn mower, not everybody has "two mowable acres," which was one of the thresholds, a great phrase — not everybody has that, somebody in an apartment building probably shouldn't be getting the John Deere riding mower ad, but you deliver that to folks who may be in market, and those are long cycles anyway — so, strange example, but why not.

Andrew Roseman: Well, I do like "mowable acres," that's a new phrase for me.

Jake Litke: Credit to Bruce Anderson and the folks at Invidi, who do addressable TV, I think that was one of their case studies, so I don't want anyone to think I'm borrowing it, full credit to Bruce, he's something of a genius.

CTV as a Brand Awareness Tool

Jake Litke: Well, let's continue on the awareness portion — in terms of the power of CTV as a brand awareness tool, we work with lots of advertisers heavily focused on ROAS, on spend, and we see that a lot with newer businesses, they're very focused, and they should be, on immediate revenue — but the counterpoint is, if you're just focusing at the bottom of the funnel, that's a finite number of people who exist there, and you need to do some amount of awareness, to put people into awareness and then consideration. Do you have any examples of campaigns you've run for a larger brand, where they had a decent budget, ran TV awareness, and then full-funnel using other tactics to support it, where you've seen success?

Case Study: A Financial Services Brand on CTV

Andrew Roseman: Sure, and, actually, it's an almost adjacent category — I worked for a time around hard spirits, for one of the hard spirits majors, and, again, restricted category, self-imposed restriction on television advertising, actually, it was never legislatively prohibited, the industry itself said, "we're not going to continue to advertise," they came back in recently — that marketing is really sophisticated and interesting, because if you're launching — this had to do with the launch of a premium spirit, on a brand already well known, just a new extension of it. Spirits marketing is fascinating, because quite a lot of it happens at retail, at hotel, restaurant, cafes, everything from bar mats to signage to shelf talkers at retail — so this had to do with introducing a super-premium version of a spirit, and it made sense to deliver that messaging specifically to households that would also encounter the messaging and tactics that were 360, also in that environment — none of this stuff stands alone. I think cannabis is fascinating, I was in a conversation just this morning with an owner of a dispensary, as well as a CBD business, getting ready for this, and really learned quite a lot, about where the market is from a maturity perspective — so much brand velocity in the cannabis space is built on word of mouth, and that was fascinating to me, it's a really interesting category to establish the bona fides, and the product benefits of an individual brand, because it's experiential. It's almost a case, in cannabis, CBD, and wellness, that the messaging through CTV almost needs to reinforce what's already being generated in the culture about that brand, whether it's value for money, or deeply embedded in the culture by working with rappers and other people — so I find the whole category fascinating, and I wish I had a stock answer, but I'm still just getting immersed.

Jake Litke: Yeah, we've been encouraging our advertisers to push into CTV, and we do have an attribution solution now where we can measure, this household was served a CTV ad, and subsequently made a purchase, within whatever attribution window you want. One of the bigger holdups we've seen, though, is people being intimidated by video production — a lot of people think, in their mind, "I need to create like a Super Bowl ad if I'm going to put something on TV," but if you're watching a show on Amazon Prime Video, many of those ad units are not very sophisticated, some are a little more than a slideshow with a QR code.

Video Production Doesn't Need to Be a Super Bowl Ad

Jake Litke: Do you have any metrics you've seen, even anecdotally, of campaigns run on CTV that weren't sophisticated video productions but still performed well, from a KPI perspective?

Andrew Roseman: Yeah, for sure — there's one financial services client we've been working with since 2019 on CTV, they're very forward, share of voice was fantastic in 2019, before people really knew about it. I can tell you what we've seen in terms of unaided awareness, by the time they're being targeted by other things — but the messaging around financial services, conquesting somebody in the financial services realm is a very long process — I don't know about you, let me just ask, how long have you been with your primary bank?

Jake Litke: Like 20 years.

Andrew Roseman: What would it take to get you to just move all your primary banking?

Jake Litke: Well, I'm actually in the process of doing that, and what it took was some bad experiences with the bank, had to do with the relationship I have with other bankers.

Andrew Roseman: Okay, well, there you have it, something went wrong with your current provider, it wasn't that somebody else came along and enticed you. Financial services are tricky, getting people to buy investment products and think about the future — but what we've seen, we've got five years of data around the CTV efforts, and I can tell you, I try to avoid certainty, I think certainty is a trap, but I think the degree of education we've been able to put into those 30-second spots — what are the primary benefits you'll receive — we know categorically that's been well communicated, demonstrated through research. So if your objective is, "here are the three things my product will do," it works if you're consistent — and the other part you brought up is, if you demand some sort of metric on "what's my ROAS for every dollar I put in," you're kind of missing the point, building a brand, that investment, all that other lower-funnel work you're doing, direct response, benefits from that, that tide has risen — but you're not going to continue to make that investment once you've built your brand, reached your cruising altitude, established it, staked a claim, that's an ownable space, and I'd encourage all brands in the cannabis space to think about their "40 acres and a mule," and claim that, because if you don't, somebody else is going to be living on it.

Building Brand Awareness Through Billboards and CTV Together

Jake Litke: Yeah, that makes sense — well, let's talk more about awareness, as I call it a squishy metric, I know there are lots of measurement tools for it, but especially in the cannabis space, all the brands are new, from the basic concepts of a brand — everything out in the market now hasn't been out more than a decade at most, maybe some legacy California brands have some local brand awareness, but to the broader market — we started working with a large delivery service, and this is actually several dispensary chains we've worked with, where they had invested a bunch of money early on in billboards, and there were people who maybe thought that was a bad idea or a good idea, but I can definitely tell you, for companies we work with that made that investment early on, and got their name at least in the psyche of the general populace of the market, the subsequent digital advertising we did, programmatic, banner ads, basic video ads, vastly outperformed a brand that hadn't done that. So I think TV is a good medium for that, however, I think a lot of people are hung up trying to measure it the way they'd measure direct response campaigns, skipping a part of the traditional marketing process. I've tried to have this conversation many times — I'd be curious how you'd approach it, if talking to an advertiser afraid of doing this — let's get past the creative production part, let's say they've got that figured out, now they're looking at, "you really need to spend thousands of dollars to do an effective campaign," how do you arm the marketer to go back to their CFO or owner and say this is a good investment?

Billboards, Portability, and Owning Your "40 Acres and a Mule"

Andrew Roseman: Well, you can either lean on the attributes of connected TV that are differentiated and valuable — high-impact ad, retention and recall so much higher than TV versus banner blindness — it is a branding vehicle, establishing the name. Your out-of-home example is fascinating, and I think the reason it works is, that billboard is stationary, hitting a certain group of people who will be in that environment, that's, by definition, who it is — the portability of a TV ad, and the targetability of a TV ad, with CTV, is an extraordinary opportunity, now I can stick that billboard into a living room of choice. And that's super powerful, because the activation side comes later, through any of those other mechanisms, digital, standard targeting, display, retargeting — but it's not going to be a free-for-all forever, people come up with portfolios of brands that fit into their lifestyle, that match their values, and, as a marketer, you need to establish what those values are, and your responsibility is to put that out into the marketplace, to attract the people who share those values — that's the idea.

Tailoring Creative to Multicultural Audiences

Jake Litke: Yeah, they're TV ads — what about some examples where you've taken a CTV activation for a brand and tailored the creative itself towards multiple audiences, what were the tactics used, and what output did you see in terms of performance?

Andrew Roseman: So, the example, it's probably worth talking about — campaign, or brand, same advertiser, multicultural side — objectively, the idea was, we want to reach and activate multicultural audiences, Hispanic American, African American, Asian American, and it turns out, behaviorally, around that particular financial services category, they were different — values around savings, investing, self-directed versus guided, all those things exposed themselves through research, and then you use that as an input, saying, "the benefit claims we're making to the Hispanic American audience are going to be slightly different than the African American audience, or the Asian American audience" — take your inputs, get your insights, adjust your messaging to meet your market, don't expect them to come to you because the general market messaging wasn't as effective. What we found is, we actually saw meaningful change in response rates.

Jake Litke: You could do a similar concept inside the cannabis industry, because within the industry itself there are a lot of different use cases — you can always use the example of people who like high-THC vape carts versus people who like sleep gummies, those are fundamentally different products, they just happen to be the same category of plant. So you could do product differentiation — if you had a customer list, and you know who your vape users are and who your gummy purchasers are, you could run a campaign, same brand, but different product offerings in the creative to different audiences.

Selling Benefits, Not Features

Andrew Roseman: One of the things I learned in my days as a recovering agency guy, which I think is still true, is, you never sell features, you sell benefits — for the gummy side, I'll give you an example, we never talked about maximum speed or acceleration, we talked about performance, we never talked about braking and cornering, we talked about safety. So, for somebody suffering from insomnia, you're meeting a particular consumer need, for somebody dealing with anxiety, social anxiety, which apparently is accelerating like crazy since COVID, you're meeting a consumer need — okay, same THC, it may be that people want high potency for whatever reason, let's not dissect their reasoning, but I'd suggest marketers come to understand what need state their products fulfill, and build messages around fulfilling needs, versus their product dimensions.

Jake Litke: Yeah, that makes sense, needs versus features, that's a good point, okay, that's one for me.

Andrew Roseman: We'll keep a scoreboard, you're at more than one point.

Can CTV Replace the Landing Page? The QVC for Cannabis Idea

Jake Litke: So, dovetailing into that, we sometimes get new advertisers who want to run ads to basically just their shop page, and they're skipping that need-benefit part of the conversation with the consumer, as to why they want these things, versus just, "here's things I have to sell." Do you think you can leverage CTV effectively to prepare someone prior to landing on a shopping experience, in a similar way that, if you're doing a digital campaign, online banners or native, you usually want to take someone to a landing page tied to the activation, do some validation, earn some trust, social proof, and then go to the shopping experience? Have you seen examples of TV activations where you can do enough in 30 seconds to get the person to a point where they can just go and purchase, more than if they just went to the site from clicking a link?

Andrew Roseman: I don't know that the duration is right for that — I was thinking about this today, speaking with the dispensary owner, a QVC for cannabis would be the best channel ever, it just would, right, because QVC moves a ton of merchandise, why, because it's just a barker channel, people telling you this is wonderful, advocating for the product in 10 or 15 minute chunks, long enough to tell a complex story. Is 30 seconds long enough to tell a convincing, complex story? Maybe, maybe.

Jake Litke: Well, that's not a bad idea, should we go start a channel?

Andrew Roseman: I think we should, and I think the truth is, we'd probably print money if we did it — you just invite in, I was thinking about it, like Cookies, right, he's aggregating brands, he's finding and bringing in product, and then people, immediately, there's the imprimatur of, "okay, it's coming under the umbrella of somebody I already trust, let me consider it."

Jake Litke: Yeah, I mean, I'd do that in a minute, you just got to organize everyone to come on in.

Andrew Roseman: I think there is that middle step, I think you're right, but that middle step may just be at retail, and this industry is different than most, because your product selection from retail location to retail location varies orders of magnitude.

Jake Litke: That's right, I'm in New Jersey, we've got it, it's a little different here — if you establish a brand and a desire for a particular brand, what I'm told is people walk into these retail establishments saying, "I want X," they've got a picture of it on their phone, they already know what they want, which is good, you just got to make sure you have it.

Measuring Outcomes and KPIs

Jake Litke: All right, let's talk about APIs and outcomes — you've mentioned some campaigns where you were split testing with different multicultural segments, and there were positive performance indicators, what is someone going to look for from a positive indicator, other than, obviously, did sales go up?

Andrew Roseman: Did sales go up, did inquiries go up — a lot of this is direct-to-consumer, brands themselves have their own ability to move merchandise from their own owned and operated domains, they also have distributors, so there's a bit of channel conflict — distributors advertising, telling people to buy multi-product from them, individual brands advertising, "buy my brand," buy it direct, buy it from somebody else. I think the KPIs I'd look for, I'd start with the basic ones — did I deliver in full, what percentage of my total addressable market did I reach, at what frequency, and do I even know what frequency is necessary to start driving performance metrics — I'd do that first.

Thinking About Frequency Across Channels

Jake Litke: Well, let's dig into frequency, since people have different opinions — when talking to a brand, whatever the size, city, state, or national, what are some guidelines you'd give people for frequency, how many ads to an actual household, in a week, day, or month?

Andrew Roseman: Let's get rid of the political stuff, and talk about the real world — I think about it in a couple ways. First of all, try not to think of it in a silo, people always talk about, "what's my frequency on my TV campaign," but if you're also on radio, doing direct mail, you need to contemplate all those points of contact a consumer may have with your brand — the frequency by channel is almost an arbitrary number, and you want to look, in some mature categories, a lot of media plans start with television, you figure out the optimal frequency for a campaign, and, by the way, that can change over the course of a campaign — you may want 2x the frequency at the beginning of a five-week campaign than at the end, because you've established it, you're moving into other tactics by then. So there's no set answer, the only advice I'd give would be, if TV is where you're starting, start there, and then the frequency of what you need everywhere else, including your digital media, native, display, OLV as a complement. Now, if you're already doing those other things, and coming in to start CTV, you really need to think about whether this is excess — and make sure you're actually reaching the same people, one of the hardest things to do with CTV is make sure that reach matches your digital reach.

Jake Litke: What do you mean by that, where's the difficulty?

Andrew Roseman: Well, it sounds like you have a solution — you're able to retarget people who've been exposed to a CTV campaign, is that right?

Jake Litke: Correct, yeah, that is correct.

Andrew Roseman: Great, that really wasn't the case a couple years ago, wasn't super perfect, and, let's be honest, your solution is probably going to keep getting better, so, as good as it is today, it'll keep improving, but connecting the formats — you can probably understand your reach across native, display, OLV pretty simply, cookie-based or a third-party ID.

Jake Litke: Yeah, there's a few different identifiers — I guess I was looking for something more philosophical, there's some old adages about a consumer needing to see your brand 10 times, 15 times, a dozen, or 20 — I'm mostly talking about newer brands, because there's really no household brands in cannabis. So if someone says, "okay, I want to put my budget together, I want to reach these 50,000 people in the market around my store," and my CPM is $30, or whatever it ends up being, how many dollars should I be spending on those 50,000 people to get at least some seed of brand awareness on CTV, and then ideally follow up with some cheaper formats to amplify that message?

Budgeting for a Brand-New Advertiser

Andrew Roseman: Well, not all 50,000 of those people will be reachable on CTV, so the first thing to figure out is what your actual addressable universe is. Then the question becomes — there's no perfect way to do this — if you're establishing a new brand, particularly in a controlled category — let's just assume we've done a reach analysis and think we can reach 50,000 people via CTV inside our target cohort — I wouldn't go light, let's put it that way, I would not have an upper threshold, set it super high, 20 or 30, there's really no downside, when you're establishing a brand, to being too noticed. The diminishing returns will happen later, but not in the early phase.

Jake Litke: Yeah, we have a similar thing with just programmatic display — we'll have conversations with people, let's say it's "national," I'll put that in quotes because national hemp isn't really national, but let's say the legal states, and they've got a budget, they want to spend $20,000, and you're like, you don't want to target the country with that, because your impressions will be so dispersed you'll get a handful of people who all see one impression — you want dozens of impressions in front of someone, ideally. So we tell people, if that's your budget, pick a city, or, if it's a large city, pick a handful of zip codes where you can actually get some brand equity out of the investment, otherwise it's kind of a wasted effort if it's too dispersed.

Building Advocates in the Community

Andrew Roseman: I was thinking about this earlier, from the conversation with the dispensary owner — I think the objective, at this point, for brands in the cannabis field, is potentially use those budgets to create advocates, because those connector advocates in the communities are going to be able to amplify that brand message into the cohort in a way that media may not be able to, in an even more concentrated way — see if you can figure out who is that "maven" in the group, what does that profile look like, who's a thought leader, an influencer, and build your media effort around converting people who will convert other people.

Jake Litke: I see, so in that instance, maybe it's identifying a smaller target audience that falls into this "maven" category, and focusing budget towards them?

Andrew Roseman: I don't think it's one or the other — on one hand, if you have a cohort, potential consumers, potentially already buying other brands, what you don't know is why — you're coming at it with almost a brute-force approach of, "I know they're currently buying in this category, I'm going to tell them things about my product." I'd say it's probably a better use of money to figure out why they're buying that particular brand — whether it's for insomnia, arthritis pain, mental health and wellness, focus and concentration, whatever the consumer rationale is — if you can get to that, your spend can be that much more efficient. But I'm still a huge believer in creating advocates, because that's where it's happening, in the development of this marketplace, it's kind of ground up.

Advertising to People Who Have Never Advertised Before

Jake Litke: How would you talk to someone who's, let's say, new to advertising — we frequently run into dispensaries or brands that have done really no advertising, just trying to get into it, operating on a complete blank slate from a media perspective. Doesn't matter what the budget is, let's just say it's X, and we're going to slice that pie up between CTV brand awareness work, targeted programmatic, potentially some other channels like radio or mailers — I know this is a difficult question, but broadly, would you say, take half your budget towards brand awareness, a quarter towards retention, a quarter towards offers, or where's a starting point for someone who's done nothing, in terms of budget allocation among these different formats?

Andrew Roseman: I look at the area of influence — so much of this revolves around your latitude and longitude, where you can access the product. If it's e-commerce, it's not, but if it's direct — if this really is drive-to-retail, understand that retail environment, what digital out-of-home may be available within that specific radius, make sure you're capturing that, saturating those touchpoints, because that's really going to give you a lot of value early on. If it's straight up, "we're national, you can order our stuff from anywhere," I don't think 20 grand for a full national campaign is going to do it — I don't have a specific answer, again, but the important thing for people without experience in advertising to realize is, you're not chasing a single transaction, you're chasing loyalty, and once you've established that, transactions become less expensive and less difficult to make. But if you treat advertising as a coin-operated thing, "I put this money in, I get this out," every transaction is going to have effectively the same cost — brand allows you to reduce that cost over time, and to maintain those customers, otherwise you have to recapture a customer every time, that's the difference between durable brands and folks who come and go.

Brand Loyalty and the Psychology of Seeing an Ad on TV

Jake Litke: Got a two-part question then — have you seen any data points on the amount of brand equity or stature given, psychologically, for someone seeing an ad on TV versus a website or their phone? And, second, I think everyone's experienced this, when there's a product you like, you have an affinity with, and when you see the ad for it on TV, there's a level of validation, "oh, yeah, that's my shoe company, I have that thing" — and I know, in automotive, you probably know this more accurately, but I heard something like half of automotive budgets, especially for luxury brands, are served specifically to existing owners, to make them continue to feel good about the brand purchase they made in the past, so that when they go to get a new car, they still want to stick with that brand.

Andrew Roseman: Well, whatever architecture you built this brand on, you need to be consistent, you can't go from saying "here are the great things about this brand" and then radically change it the next time. I think you're right about reinforcing and re-establishing — repurchase is everything, particularly on a long-considered purchase, "share of driveway," you're only getting a shot at that every three to seven years, and, in this category, it's still really important, because, think about it, "this is my brand, we have shared values, whether it's organic, or tested and approved by a third party," this is a different sort of thing, this is something you put into your body, this changes the calculus, makes it much more like — I don't want to say pharmaceutical, but it really is a different calculation, psychologically — it's less of an expression of who you are, like the clothes I wear, or the car I drive, but repurchase is the ultimate KPI, nonetheless.

Jake Litke: So circling back to the first part — have you seen any studies or data showing the difference in value, psychologically, for a consumer to see a brand on TV in their living room, watching a show, versus an ad while checking the weather on their phone — there's got to be some subconscious elevation from the fact that your brand's on TV.

Andrew Roseman: Well, there's a lot going on with attention metrics these days, and it's fascinating to see that come to the fore, how it's being measured, eye tracking — there's a company called TVision that has a measurement product, in the home, checking whether people are paying attention. So the psychological validation part, yeah, you get your validation from seeing it there, but human beings are also just — we're more basic, you get validation from people, much more than — that's why you see celebrities in TV ads, projecting yourself into a scene, that's the reason I like advertising, so much of it is aspiration, and I think the role of advertising is more to make you consider, part of that, you see the lifestyle, which is why I think so much of the culture stuff around cannabis is so important, whether it's cultural ambassadors endorsing the products, that's high-value stuff, and putting that onto TV would be great.

Jake Litke: Maybe we figured something out here, Andrew, it's QVC for cannabis, with cultural ambassadors.

Andrew Roseman: Absolutely, you got to have segments for all the different cultural categories, half-hour spots.

The Storytelling Exercise: Defining Your Brand

Jake Litke: That's not really a story, is it, a price promotion isn't a story.

Andrew Roseman: The three P's of marketing — I think you're absolutely right, I think advocacy, testimonials go a long way. If you're establishing a brand that sits across multiple products, and this is really about a brand — there are 11 different varieties of Coca-Cola these days, but the Coke brand is what creates the interest, "oh, that flavor, less sugar" — so if you have a multi-brand, multi-product portfolio underneath the brand, I would keep it very high level, choose the two, maybe three things you want people to think and associate with your brand. A lot of this comes down to, brand design isn't easy, you got to choose your name, your colors, your sound, your brand voice — don't think it just falls out, "oh, yeah, it's the name of my company," no, you need to really calculate this, make sure it's authentic, and can be delivered in a way you believe in and can replicate. So keep it tight, decide what you're saying, how you want to say it, what your brand feels like, and I think you're right, a lot of folks in the category haven't taken the moment to do that, but that's the part where I get to say I'm happy to help them do that, I've done this a couple times, I'd have a lot of fun doing that with an emerging cannabis brand.

Jake Litke: And that's an exercise you can go through with someone — when you work with companies, do you actually take the time, if they want to sit down, and help them come up with their story and what they should be saying?

Andrew Roseman: Absolutely, I came from a full-service agency, I'm not just a media guy, and, in fact, that's the only way to really get it to work, and to feel — you have to go through some of these processes so the brands feel great about their choices, part of deciding who you are as a brand is deciding who you're —

Jake Litke: Not everyone.

Andrew Roseman: Yeah, and that's the hard thing for folks to do, everybody wants to appeal to everybody, but the most successful brands understand that their appeal is specific.

Jake Litke: Yeah, that's a conversation we have pretty frequently, because we start off saying, "who are you trying to reach," and, unfortunately, most of the time the answer is "everyone," and then we need to have a conversation about that. You can approach it a number of ways — the reality situation is, you don't have enough money to reach everyone, so let's not try to do that to start with — but the other thing is, you need to understand that, for storytelling to be effective, it needs to resonate with the person you're talking to, and people are very different from each other, so you can't have one activation that's effective on everyone. Design your activation around a specific group, connect with them in a voice they appreciate, and don't try to send that message to people who are either going to be apathetic about it, or, at worst, dislike it.

Andrew Roseman: Well, voice is something that's going to run through every message you ever send in the future, so get real comfortable with how you sound, how you present — messages can change, you might end up with a price promotion for "Green Wednesdays," that might happen, but it has to come surrounded by whatever you've decided your brand feels like.

Jake Litke: Yeah, I agree.

Live Q&A: Age-Gating and Geofenced Walk-In Data

Jake Litke: All right, well, we're closing up on the hour here, are there any tidbits you want to convey, things I didn't ask you, that maybe — we have two questions, I'm looking at the Q&A, because I'm a heck of a good guest.

Andrew Roseman: Oh, yeah, all right, I didn't actually see the questions, sorry about that.

Jake Litke: Let's see — okay, over here, a question about, "Massachusetts has to be 85% over 21" — that number varies by state, sometimes it's 73, New York I think is 90 — how can CTV accommodate this, do you want to take this one?

Andrew Roseman: My understanding is that age-gating on CTV is nowhere near as complicated as online — the way we do it is by targeting households based on the demographics we know about that household, whether or not there's a presence of children, the general age range, and you can devise a media plan to be in compliance with those rules.

Jake Litke: That's actually kind of one for everything we have to do, knowing age and geography is everything — we have now, just last week, in I forget which state, a specific set of cities that have outlawed hemp products, and, obviously, different legalization, but it's not even at the state level sometimes, it's down to the county or city level, where we have to do blackouts, "we can't run any ads here, in this circle, but we can run them over here" — and, of course, making sure we're targeting households and channels that are for mature audiences.

Andrew Roseman: Great, other question here — "partner for historical lookback data."

Jake Litke: Okay, yeah, this is for walk-ins, and we use this tactic quite a bit — Susan, I forget which company you're with, if you want to put it in chat, I'll mention you — this is a tactic we use for all kinds of digital, drawing polygons around physical locations, finding device IDs that have been seen in that location, and using that as a target audience. We use this all the time for dispensary visitors, we have all the dispensaries geofenced, we've got an audience of device IDs seen there, and we also have a device identity graph, so we can correlate those devices back to the households in which they reside, which then allows you to do CTV targeting once you know the household-level data — Cumulus Media, that was Susan from Cumulus Media mentioning that. It's a highly effective tactic, works well for a lot of things, not just cannabis, could be restaurants, gyms, any tactic involving understanding your target consumers' past physical behavior comes into play here, and I've seen some very creative uses of this with campaigns before.

Andrew Roseman: Good to know.

Jake Litke: All right, Andrew, anything else while we have you today?

Andrew Roseman: No, thank you for having me, I was a little nervous about it, but this is fun.

Jake Litke: Yeah, it's not too hard — maybe you can close up, Andrew Roseman, what's the name of your company, how can people reach you if they want to?

Closing Remarks

Andrew Roseman: Arise Communications — there's a new website coming, I should really finalize it, you can find us, find me on LinkedIn, that's a good way right now, going into year 20 of doing this. The name coming in 2025 is similar, but, speaking of branding, it's kind of a rebranding, rebirth — not quite 21, so it might not be legal yet, but we will be by 2026. I'd love to hear from anyone, 212-398-2121, speaking of 21, call us here in New York, or find us on LinkedIn — this is a pleasure, love to work with brands in this category, I find it fascinating, and also just difficult enough to make it really fun.

Jake Litke: Yeah, it is, it is challenging but not boring, so may you never be bored, thanks for doing this.

Andrew Roseman: Yeah.

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