Last month, gift and fruit sculpture delivery company Edible Arrangements launched Edibles.com, a marketplace for, you guessed, it, hemp-derived THC drinks and edibles.
With “edible” in its name, how could Edible Arrangements not get into the budding cannabis delivery business?
After all, so many people must already be Googling “edibles delivery” and ending up on its property by accident.
In fact, SEO has become a huge priority, said Thomas Winstanley, EVP and GM of the Edibles.com business. He’s very “bullish” on it.
“Half the battle here is won,” Winstanley said. “We have this word.”
Health and wellness
The particulars of keyword associations and branding in regulated categories such as cannabis, financial services and gambling recently became more important. Advertisers in those categories face far more restrictions now.
Google has placed major constraints on “sensitive” classes of advertisers, and Meta enacted sweeping changes for health and wellness advertisers starting this year.
Meta’s new policies don’t apply as hard-and-fast rules across the board, but they give Meta far greater license to suspend accounts or campaigns that it identifies as being in breach of its standards, often based on the use of certain words or targeting parameters.
As a result, many companies that at one point would have marketed themselves as “health and wellness” brands – cosmetics or supplements sellers, say – now shun the term.
Edibles.com, however, is happy to use “health and wellness” as an umbrella term. Its press release on the launch leans heavily on references to “health and wellness” and “hemp-derived THC.”
Navigating the finer points of using keywords in the cannabis category is an interesting experience, said Winstanley, who previously was CMO of marijuana dispensary Wellness Theory. For instance, there’s the tension between how users actually talk and think about products and what works best for keywords or marketing content.
“Do people use the term ‘infused beverages,’ rather than ‘cannabis beverages,’ for example,” he said. “How do we put wagers on some of these terms?”
Regardless, the organic inbound on “edibles delivery” and “flower delivery” (flower being the common dispensary nomenclature for weed) makes the Edible Arrangement’s IP a valuable starting point, he said.
And this isn’t even its first foray into the category. Edible Arrangement has included CBD chocolate in its fruit arrangements before, Winstanley pointed out.
An appetite for Edibles risk
But around 10 to 15 years ago, pharma brands couldn’t use AdWords to promote cannabis at all or even pay for online ads in many common places.
The current state of advertising cannabis products is very different – and the challenge is greater, said Winstanley, who also spent time at agencies working on pharmaceutical accounts.
Take working with influencers, for example, whose scripts must be carefully vetted.
Generally, influencers prefer a hands-off approach so the material feels authentic. But a cannabis influencer could easily stray into topics that trigger an account or campaign suspension or bring unwelcome scrutiny on the brand.
To be extra careful, Edibles.com has several brand-operated accounts, many of which are not overtly tied to the site but are part of a comprehensive testing approach for what types of words, creatives and targeting are kosher with the platforms.
Across these official and unofficial Edibles.com accounts, a campaign proceeds by iteration and refinements based on what the platforms allow to proceed or if they pull the plug on certain keywords, creatives or accounts.
“You put your best foot forward,” Winstanley said, “learn and quickly adapt” to what particular terms or tactics are being flagged by platforms.
And, he’s quick to add, if something doesn’t work, don’t try it again.
But it’s worth making your advertising work on the more tightly regulated platforms, despite the challenges, he said, because it’s a way to reach certain audiences.
For example, Twitter and then X has played an important role in general as the first scaled social network to accept ad dollars from edibles and cannabis sellers.
But X wouldn’t make sense for Edibles.com right now, which is narrowly focused on deliveries in a handful of states, rather than across X’s national footprint.
Also, Winstanley noted that X users overall are not the type of health and wellness consumers that the Edibles.com brand is looking for. The brand has a segmented approach where it targets “the initiated” with more dispensary-ish marketing, and another strategy geared toward people “who may be curious about these products but never really had permission to try them,” he said.
Regardless, X is useful in the marketplace because it underscores the degree to which the advertising ecosystem’s policies are tied to each platform’s risk tolerance, Winstanley said, and often aren’t about trying to comply with regulations.
“[X] sent a really powerful signal to our industry to bring your ad dollars,” Winstanley said, which helped lead the way.
Marketers in the space were happy that. “Finally, somebody took our dollars,” he quipped.
