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4 Music Festival Marketing Strategies for Cannabis Brands

Music festivals are one of the highest-concentration environments for cannabis consumers, making them a prime opportunity for cannabis brands to build awareness and drive engagement. This webinar covers four strategies for reaching festival audiences with compliant, effective advertising.You'll learn how to use geofencing to target festival attendees, how to leverage MediaJel's Data Shop to build audience segments around music and lifestyle interests, and how to pair your ad campaigns with the right content for this audience. Whether you're planning around a single event or building a full festival season strategy, this session gives you the playbook.

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Key Insights

Pre-festival digital targeting of ticket buyers and local music festival audiences through programmatic advertising builds brand awareness before the event so that on-site activation encounters consumers who already have a degree of brand familiarity, dramatically improving brand recall compared to cold on-site encounters alone.
On-site cannabis brand activation at festivals must create a shareable experience rather than just a display, because word-of-mouth and social sharing extend the marketing value of a festival presence far beyond the consumers who physically attend the activation.
Post-festival retargeting of attendees through geofence-captured audiences is one of the most efficient ways to extend festival marketing investment, converting the awareness built on-site into measurable post-event engagement through digital follow-up campaigns.
Cannabis brands that partner with music artists, stage sponsors, or festival producers gain access to the credibility and audience attention that comes with an official event association, producing stronger brand lift than independent presence in the general festival footprint.
Collecting opt-in contact information at festival activations, through swag exchanges, QR code prompts, or digital games, converts festival attendees into owned audience members that the brand can engage long after the event ends.

Expert Answers

[{How can cannabis brands market at music festivals?}

Cannabis brands can market at music festivals through a combination of pre-event digital advertising targeting ticket buyers, on-site experiential activations in the festival footprint, artist or stage partnerships that provide official event association, sampling programs where legally permitted, and post-event digital retargeting of attendees captured through geo-framing. Effective festival marketing requires coordination across all phases of the event lifecycle, not just on-site presence, to produce brand lift that extends beyond the event weekend and into measurable consumer engagement.

{What is geofencing for music festival cannabis marketing?}

Geofencing for music festival cannabis marketing involves drawing a digital boundary around the festival venue and serving cannabis brand ads to the mobile devices of attendees who enter that boundary. This allows cannabis brands to reach consumers while they are in the festival environment and in a discovery mindset, reinforcing any on-site brand presence with a consistent digital touchpoint. Post-festival geo-framing then retargets those same consumers after the event ends, extending the brand's marketing presence into the weeks following the festival when purchase intent from the festival experience is still active.

{What should a cannabis brand activation look like at a music festival?}

An effective cannabis brand activation at a music festival creates an immersive, shareable experience that gives attendees a reason to engage, photograph, and share the brand with their networks. Visual design should be distinctive and Instagram-worthy to generate organic social amplification. The experience should include a clear brand story, product or sampling interaction where permitted, a mechanism for capturing attendee contact information such as a QR code opt-in for a giveaway, and staff who can have genuine conversations about the brand. Every activation element should reinforce a single clear brand message rather than trying to communicate multiple product or company messages simultaneously.

{How do cannabis brands measure ROI from music festival marketing?}

Cannabis brands measure ROI from music festival marketing through a combination of direct metrics and brand lift indicators. Direct metrics include post-event social follower growth, email and SMS list growth from on-site contact capture, geo-framed audience size captured for retargeting, and sales lift in markets where the festival occurred during and after the event period. Brand lift measurement includes aided and unaided awareness surveys administered to festival attendees before and after the event, social mention volume and sentiment tracking, and digital engagement rates on post-event retargeting campaigns compared to baseline.]

Webinar Highlights

00:00 - Why Music Festivals Matter for Cannabis Brand Marketing

The session opens with a look at the audience profile of major music festival attendees and why this demographic aligns closely with the cannabis brand consumer target, establishing the strategic rationale for festival investment beyond opportunistic presence.

08:00 - Strategy 1: Pre-Festival Digital Targeting

This section covers how cannabis brands use programmatic advertising and social campaigns to build awareness with festival ticket buyers and local music audiences before the event, ensuring that on-site encounters happen with consumers who already have some brand familiarity.

18:00 - Strategy 2: On-Site Activation Design

The webinar details the elements of an effective cannabis brand on-site activation, including experiential design principles, staffing strategy, sampling logistics where permitted, and the specific shareable elements that extend the activation's reach through attendee social sharing.

26:00 - Strategy 3: Artist and Stage Partnerships

This section covers how cannabis brands can pursue artist, stage, and festival producer partnerships that provide official event association, audience credibility, and premium placement that independent on-site presence cannot achieve.

34:00 - Strategy 4: Post-Festival Retargeting and Audience Nurture

The session closes with the post-event digital strategy that converts festival-built awareness into ongoing brand engagement, including geo-framed audience retargeting, email and SMS nurture for contact-captured attendees, and how to measure the sustained brand lift produced by festival marketing investment over the following 30 to 90 days.

Frequently Asked Questions

[ {Which music festivals are best for cannabis brand marketing?}

The best music festivals for cannabis brand marketing are those with audiences that closely match the brand's target consumer profile in terms of age range, lifestyle orientation, and geographic presence. Festivals in cannabis-legal states with high attendee concentrations of adults 21 to 35 in urban and outdoor lifestyle categories tend to produce the strongest results for cannabis brands. Multi-day camping festivals attract consumers who are more likely to be active cannabis users during the event, while urban single-day festivals offer geographic concentration and higher local resident attendance that can drive sustained post-event market presence.

{What budget does a cannabis brand need for music festival marketing?}

Cannabis brand music festival marketing budget varies significantly based on the scale of activation, the level of official partnership pursued, and whether the brand is investing in pre and post-event digital campaigns alongside on-site presence. A basic on-site activation with staffing and materials can be executed for $10,000 to $30,000 at a regional festival. A multi-festival strategy with pre-event digital targeting, meaningful on-site presence, and post-event retargeting campaigns at a major national festival typically requires $50,000 to $150,000 or more. Brands with limited budgets produce better results from full investment in one strategically selected festival than thin presence across multiple events.

{How do cannabis brands collect consumer data at music festivals?}

Cannabis brands collect consumer data at music festivals through QR code opt-in prompts at activation stations that exchange an incentive such as a giveaway entry, exclusive content, or a digital coupon for an email address or phone number, digital games or interactive experiences that require contact information to participate, NFC-enabled brand elements that trigger a landing page with an opt-in form, and staff-facilitated enrollment in the brand's loyalty or ambassador program. All data collection must comply with applicable privacy laws and clearly communicate to attendees how their contact information will be used.

{Can cannabis brands sponsor music festivals?}

Yes, cannabis brands can sponsor music festivals in cannabis-legal states, though the terms of what sponsorship allows in terms of signage, sampling, and brand placement varies by festival and local cannabis promotion regulations. Some festivals actively seek cannabis brand partners and offer structured sponsorship packages with stage naming rights, VIP area association, and official event promotion. Others accept cannabis brand presence at the exhibitor level without formal sponsorship designation. Cannabis brands pursuing festival sponsorship should work with an attorney familiar with local cannabis marketing regulations to ensure the sponsorship structure complies with applicable advertising and promotion laws in the event's jurisdiction. ]

Webinar Full Transcript

[ {Intro}

wonderful hello everyone and welcome to the MediaJel podcast i am your host guillermo bravo today we'll be discussing the four mute um festival market music festival marketing strategies for cannabis brands with courtney brown a MediaJel connects brands and retailers with cannabis consumers through our ad network of mainstream publishers mobile apps games and tv we help cannabis companies advertise on google support and seo and activate data with display advertising support e-commerce sales courtney brown is the digital marketing manager at MediaJel she's she brings seven years of digital marketing and demand generation experience to today's podcast welcome to the podcast courtney

{Welcome}

hey everyone it is great to be back and especially on this week of all weeks uh we just celebrated 420 which is always a great day to reflect on how far this industry has come in the last 10 years and of course show some love to our beautiful green plant that the our industry is built around um MediaJel just launched the MediaJel data shop an online store that allows businesses to easily find and purchase cannabis audience data with just a few clicks it's really easy uh gamma's going to be announcing this a little later in the podcast so stay tuned that is a huge announcement plus we just had coachella and that is what we are here to discuss today four music festival marketing strategies for cannabis brands i know everyone is fatigued from the last two years people want to travel and people want to party music festivals are back in a big way uh did anyone go to coachella here drop it in the chat let us know um stats are showing that around 750 000 people attended coachella this year so that's a huge influx of people into one area and if you were prepared your cannabis brand was poised to capitalize on the audience data and those efforts will continue to benefit your programmatic campaigns over the next year okay guillermo let's break this into pre during and post preparation so everyone can be ready to target their next big music festival i know everyone wants to jump into the

{Aggregating Data}

flashy creatives first but step one should be aggregating your data yep can you share your tips for how brands can organize their first second and third party data into an audience pool so businesses can get their ads in front of the right people yeah the first would be first party data and this is the you know one of the most underutilized data points for you know retail customers and brands so you have access to all your existing customer information whether it's from your website your e-commerce platform or your point-of-sale system you can compile this data and you know kind of uh just put it all into a crm so that would be something like a alpine iq or spring rig and then from here you can understand different uh patterns that you can leverage in your campaigns so for example if you built your your first party data you can leverage this for nurturing existing customers through email and sms marketing and then you can understand your personas so that you can leverage them for let's say display advertising later so you have all that first party data accessible to you you're already capturing it through any pre-orders or e-commerce orders or in-store orders so definitely want to take advantage of that as that's the most valuable data to you as a brand and then second-party data would be you know consumer shares that first-party data with you and then you as a company can share this with another company if you think they would benefit from this uh you know some an example of this would be you know sharing that data with someone your supply chain for different brands that are related to each each uh market um so that's another way and then third party data that's for a broader use around across the entire ad ecosystem so you know data sets that are collected and managed by organizations that are not directly like you're not directly um communicating with the consumer so you can purchase this data let's say from a new frontier data or other third-party data sources and then you can leverage this third-party data layer that on to your first party data so that you can have uh even more accurate targeting for some of the ad from some of the marketing opportunities that you're you're executing on so there's a lot of different ways that you can leverage data and you know data is uh more valuable than oil now uh so it's uh and oil's getting really expensive so it's up there so definitely uh be sure you know how to kind of consolidate all that data into one flat place and then how you can actually activate that data this is huge right many businesses fall

{MediaJel Data Shop}

short on this and it's step one uh it requires a certain amount of level of marketing marketing acumen and data analysis but it bears mentioning that data is not just targeting age and gender demographics you you go you want to use your first party data and incorporate and enrich it with that second and third party information uh and then you can model it out and find users with similar behaviors to help achieve a broader scale and make sure you're spending your ad dollars more effectively yep uh another way that you could build out your cannabis audience pool is with the MediaJel data shop which is curated compliant data guarantee tell us about what we launched yesterday on 420 yeah no 420 was a huge day for cannabis data and for advertising we officially officially launched our joint partnership with narrative io and the launch of MediaJel data shop so you know this feature is a stash of cannabis related data sets ranging from let's say the cannabis enthusiast to the different buyers by state and even even admires uh you know allows companies to gain insights into when product demand is peaking and also the most popular product cannabis products and regional breakdowns of the different cannabis marketplaces so you know whether it whether you are a cannabis company looking to increase brand awareness or your concert venue you know that's looking to target cannabis consumers you know the MediaJel data shop is the easiest way to acquire uh secure cannabis audience data so that you can activate that in any of your campaigns and courtney if you can post we have a link so you can look into this a little bit further we'll post in the zoom chat here i just dropped it in there so it's ready to go yeah this is such an exciting partnership that can help you build your audience quickly so you'll definitely want to

{Geofencing}

head over there and take a look it's really easy to navigate before we move on there are two crucial tactics to target musical music festival attendees not only while they're at the event but retargeting once the event is over so guillermo what are the two tactics that we use to get ads in front of those audiences that are on site in attendance at the music festival yeah so the first one's going to be geofencing so you can draw you know you can draw a fence around the location of the event so you can serve impressions to anyone that walks within that fence so an example would be you know just drawing a fence around the polo fields in coachella or any of the events that you know can are planned throughout the festival season and then geoframing so you can actually do look back targeting on anyone that was at an event in the past so you know you can do a six month look back into everyone that was at polo field over the last six months since we know that polo field is uh known for these type of events they have coachella they have stagecoach and other events there so that you could put that those um those consumers or that out those people into an audience that you can target for other events so there's a lot of different ways that you can capture information and demographics from people that are at events and those are kind of the two of the simplest ways to do so and you can keep targeting those device ids for months to come so definitely

{Next Steps}

very very valuable okay let's shift a little now that we have our data sorted uh guillermo what are the next steps a business should take to prepare to market to an upcoming music festival yeah so you know the the music festival scene has its own you know kind of lifestyle and culture so you know we'll want to create content to match that culture so content curation uh whether it's like a photo shoot videos blog posts they should all be done beforehand so do photo shoots with your product before you know what with uh people in festival attire so that would be kind of step one is content curation uh it can take a lot of effort whether you want to do photos videos or simple uh content posts but it's definitely uh step one and then once you have all that content then you want to create a content calendar and you want to schedule that through social media so these assets can be used for your own company but then they can also be used for you know influencers if you want to you know to go down that route to really promote your brand and then you'll want to add the content to your website and to you know to make it really special for the for the visitors as it leads up to event now you can also include it in your loyalty program so if you have a campaign that is for coachella specifically then you can you know do like a one week to four week takeover of your website and you can just kind of change the background imagery and some of the the content on the site so it just kind of reflects what's going on in your local area and then you can syndicate all this content that you've created through digital marketing channels and you can just you know you can do this to increase your brand awareness and just to make sure that you have all kind of contact pieces prepared so that you can provide all these assets to third parties or leverage it for yourself so there's a lot of different ways um that you can prepare for a you know for a music festival and you just want to make sure that you have ample time so that you can you know hire the actors or anyone that you need on your team to actually create this content so that does sound like a huge amount of prep work so definitely make sure you leave plenty of time before the festival to get everything ready it's a lot more than you would think it would be i love the idea of curating a photo shoot with festival attire how fun does that sound uh you know including influencers when you can that adds a great element to your branding and social in your ads and it really gets people excited about the upcoming event plus you know it plants that seed that you got to bring this brand along with you to have this much fun and so once you have all your creatives ready to go how many weeks before the festival should you consider launching a festival-focused brand awareness campaign and what channels would you recommend launching these ads on yeah i would have the campaign ready you know one month before the event you know this gives you ample time to curate the content get the ads ready to be published and make sure that you have all the different sizes available for every advertising channel so definitely give yourself at least a month uh you know i would recommend you know in the beginning of or the end of the year you should actually have your event calendar all planned out for the entire following year so if you can do that you can get way ahead and you can order a lot of the marketing materials and anything that you need to um any of the content you need to create before the event so it's it's uh well prepared and as far as driving brand awareness for campaigns driving brand awareness through campaigns for your cannabis brand uh the first one i would look at is probably digital home out of advertising so this includes billboards and they can be found like gas stations restaurants bars and other locations where cannabis consumers you know regular state spend time and the great thing about this is if you you know you're using the MediaJel platform we can actually attribute and track sales back to a digital out of home um advertising campaign so that's uh that's the first channel the second would be display advertising so you know this is a digital replacement for billboards on your phone uh and this includes you know text images audio and video ads that can be placed across mainstream media so that can be done through the MediaJel display ad network which will allow you to advertise more explicit content where you can show some of the product but you can't show the use of the product and then also the google display network so you can run discovery campaigns or display campaigns on gmail youtube and google apps on your phone and you can display those type of content pieces there and you want to make sure that you when you do when you do advertise on the google display network that you should uh use more conservative lifestyle photos otherwise you won't get anything approved and then another would be connected tv streaming so connected tv is a you know a device um you know connected to your tv or you know something that supports video streaming so like an xbox a playstation roku amazon fire stick apple tv like all these allow you to stream tv and when consumers are streaming videos on publishers you know within the MediaJel network that we can actually show those videos [Music] to to people when they're like before or after the streaming video gotcha and then uh you know kind of seeing some some of this uh at hand here in miami you know different events you can you can leverages billboards you can do mobile billboard trucks you know i've seen airplane banner advertisements here in miami um different uh large events um you know marketing tactics that you see like an art basel coachella like i remember being at coachella and seeing you know the the cannabis delivery apps with their uh you know airplane banners going through through and around the event so that's a really popular uh you know campaign type that's a good tactic definitely map out your budget make sure that you have a you know a really great target with what you're gonna do you can't do it all um but these are some really great tactics uh should we see if there's any questions yeah if anyone would like to ask questions uh please uh just familiar style familiarize yourself with the q a on the bottom or the chat and we'll be happy to answer any questions you have for us live here uh and just a reminder that this webinar is available on demand on friday morning so there's a ton of fantastic information that guillermo just covered you're going to want to revisit it when planning your music festival strategy um so take a look at that and you can go to the MediaJel.com site forward slash or select webinars and it will be right there for your viewing pleasure okay so we've covered a lot but we can't forget about social media so after all you know music festivals are just an influencer's dream i mean that's where all of that beautiful content is created how would you recommend brands prepare their social media strategies for an upcoming festival and we kind of covered the first phase is curating your content so make sure all your content is put together and organized uh you know maybe in google drive so you can make it accessible for ambassadors if you want to go down that route so you can send ambassador you know brand ambassadors influencers to the festival with your actual product packaging so if you you know if you have like a vape pen or a specific flower brand uh you know maybe take a picture of the packaging while they're out at the event uh so that they can kind of show the product out in the wild another one yeah yeah and then you can leverage uh you know social media influencer networks to syndicate your content so there is different networks out there like dink city or top free agency uh where you can do swipe up campaigns through instagram and snapchat stories so you know if someone is on there someone's you know in los angeles or in las vegas um and they're they want to go to coachella maybe they'll start to see some of that content pop up in their feed of different friends they're at the event and then you know really just prepare yourselves on the hashtags before so you know put together a list of the top 10 hashtags and then if you could i would encourage the ambassadors to actually check in and kind of pin drop the location so that anyone that searches that actual location will start to see your images in the feed there so you know you really want to to to give your ambassadors and influencers kind of all the content that it you know as possible product if possible uh and then you know really i give them all the tools so that they can actually tag you on those platforms so uh social media is definitely gonna be a huge one instagram and facebook is where a large large number of our cannabis consumers are so you definitely want to be present on those two platforms uh yeah that's great you covered a lot of ground there i mean social media strategies are important and being on site you know

{Content}

it's it's been a long time since i've been to an event like that a few years now but i always love what you know seeing brands having a presence on site uh but there is still more to consider with content what should brands be doing on their website for a music festival preparation in terms of content and intensive incentives yeah i mean the first thing you know can instinct with your the content that you created for your social media platforms you should definitely create content for your blog um so now at least creating one two to two articles about the upcoming event uh you know what what you should wear maybe some popular trends whatever you can do to associate your brand with a festival and then uh you know if you're if you want to put together some custom incentives and bundles for festival goers and you can do that almost like a music festival kit that you can offer to people let's say they're in los angeles you know that they're going to drive to coachella coachella took that took place last week it's taking place this week so people probably are in route coachella now so if you if you're uh if you're a cannabis retailer or a brand and you're on the way that's a perfect place for you to position your brand and really just speak to you know speak to the customers where they are so that content that you created the the photos the the photo gallery that you put together like whatever you can do to give your website a fresh look for festival week depending on which week it is then definitely take advantage of that as much as possible you can also you know include some of those images in your sms campaigns email campaigns making sure that you know your entire marketing strategy and marketing strategy is integrated so everything is in sync across all channels

{Ad Strategy}

that's an excellent strategy so we have prepared and prepared and prepared now we're ready to party so let's talk ad strategy during the music festival how should we be targeting these party animals and where should we be targeting them yeah so you know for example at coachella we know that the event is taking place at the empire polo club we have the address in india california so the first thing would be you know know the date range of the event and then you can draw a geo fence around the entire empire pool empire polo club um so blanket the entire coachella valley with you know with targeting so that you can actually show them display banner advertising so you know if your brand this is a great way to gain brain awareness and if you have a like a partner retailer in the coachella valley then these ads can focus on you know driving in-store foot traffic or delivery sales to one of your partners and if you you know really plan ahead then you can even split the cost with the with your partners it's a win-win you're going to be driving brand awareness for yourselves but also in-store in-store um sales for your your brand partners and retail partners uh you know we you know a lot of people are going to be trying to travel in and out of the the kind of event area so you want to make sure that you kind of you can leverage people when they're in uber or lyft so there is ride sharing advertising that you can do with like five to ten second advertisement slots in between like videos or advertisements of local businesses so you know just uh just a reminder in your videos you can't show consumption of the product so you really want to kind of just make sure that you're conservative with those ads definitely and then when you know within the google apps you can launch lifestyle display ads that's within gmail youtube google apps and those ads will be shown native within the apps and they'll say something like sponsored or paid uh or they'll be shown in the form of like a bumper ad on the bottom bottom of the not the banner uh sorry of the app so if they're scrolling through something you might see like a or watching a video on youtube they might see a little bumper uh banner advertisement there which you can do your brand so there's a few ways that you can reach the audience that's there perfect i mean you cover it a lot there i love the ride sharing option that's always my favorite people

{Post Event Strategy}

want to go here they want to go there you know they're coming to the event they may be maybe they're staying off-site so you really have a huge opportunity there i i think that's probably my favorite takeaway here so yeah okay we've reached post event everyone's hangovers are gone hopefully and we want to make use of all the data that we've collected during the event so our post music festival advertising strategy will be all about analyzing our data looking at our pre-event ad conversions and building out retargeting campaigns what are your tips for retargeting ads are they more expensive what should you include in the creatives and where should you consider serving them yeah so i guess the first step would be to install a retargeting pixel before you launch so during that setup phase make sure that it's on there so anyone who clicks on your ad will be placing into your retargeting poll so you can serve impressions to anyone who's within that pool to increase the you know the likeliness that they'll make a purchase with you and you know we typically follow the the marketing rule of seven so a customer may you know they need to see your your brand or your ad seven times before they'll make a purchase with you and then looking at um the creative type so you know you can i would definitely recommend like offering an incentive with uh with the creative so you know they you know that they have seen your brand before so maybe like a first time customer purchase 10 percent off in first order we've seen that incentives all the way up to 30 off your first order do really well so that's another another idea or you know maybe some type of discount if they if they join your loyalty program they may get 20 off their first order so there's a few different ways you can work the creative within there and then as far as where you should serve those and you can do retargeting ads within the MediaJel uh display network and you can do it through the google display network as well and those would be you know different ads that would follow people around kind of reminding them of your brand and ensuring that they're top of mind so that they you know consider your brand uh when they're looking to kind of re-up on their canvas purchases

{Audience Data}

and if you do all of that you will definitely be targeting everyone at the music festival for a year to come as well yeah yeah and then you know that's uh that audience data you know you can you can run run remarketing campaigns for them you can do uh kind of different different segmentation so let's say they're at coachella and 50 of those audience members end up in california maybe some travel to other states so you can target them with different ads depending on where your brand is focused so you know some delivery services they only focus on socal or norcal so just really uh when you're activating those ads you want to make sure that it's within the perimeters or the the zip codes that you actually want to track conversions it's definitely important advice so take note of that yeah and then any other questions uh for any you know from anyone in the audience uh that you like answered you know just a reminder there's you know there's gonna be a major uptick in traveling this year uh you know something like 150 increase year over year so um it's going to be a great opportunity for cannabis brands to to really get in front of a new audience there's a lot of new uh adult use markets coming into play new jersey and just uh when adult use today i know york is coming as well uh new mexico and there's other other states are coming aboard so really make sure that you you could do your research find uh which you know events are taking place in your local area and you know really plan to take advantage of those absolutely

{Outro}

well thank you so much for joining us uh we covered four music festival marketing strategies for cannabis brands and a whole lot more so thank you so much for having me guillermo yeah yeah and then you know just a reminder you know MediaJel connects brands and retailers with canvas consumers you know through our ad network of mainstream publishers mobile apps games and tv and we help canvas companies advertise on google you know supporting seo and activate data with display advertising just for e-commerce sales so you know really uh if you'd like to schedule time with us to learn more about activating some of these data points i'll uh place my calendar here in the uh zoom chat and yeah would love to uh speak with you more and learn more about how you can reach music festival goers all right take care everyone bye ]