420 with CNW — Twitter Ad Policies Pose Challeng

420 with CNW — Twitter Ad Policies Pose Challenges for Cannabis Advertisers

Businesses in the cannabis sector have had to deal with extremely restrictive marketing and advertising regulations since the industry’s inception. Since cannabis is still considered a Schedule I controlled drug at the federal level, most advertisers simply cannot advertise cannabis products without running afoul of federal law.

Furthermore, states with legal cannabis products often place severe restrictions on advertising to prevent exposing cannabis to children and youth. Consequently, cannabis businesses have been forced to find ways outside the usual marketing pipelines to advertise their products to the public.

Twitter, which has more than 350 million users globally, announced in March that it would allow approved cannabis businesses to advertise on the platform, finally granting multitudes of marijuana businesses a way of marketing themselves. However, some experts questioned whether the looser restrictions on marijuana advertising would actually have a meaningful effect on America’s state-legal cannabis industry.

Those experts noted that Twitter was a relatively small platform compared to the likes of Facebook and Instagram, which have billions of users. The platform has also suffered from technical problems amid recent layoffs and has lost more than one-half of its top 1,000 advertisers in recent months.

Although Twitter eased cannabis advertising policies further in May, stating that marijuana businesses could continue linking their Twitter accounts to their e-commerce sites, businesses in the cannabis space are still struggling to leverage the platform’s relatively wide reach. In many cases, marijuana businesses are held back by regulatory red tape coupled with high costs and Twitter’s inexperience with the state-legal cannabis sector.

For starters, a gold check mark next to a business’ username costs $1,000 a month, an expense many small businesses simply cannot afford to pay while dealing with high taxes, competition from the black market and low prices. According to multistate operator Battle Green’s director for marketing Nikki Stanely, Twitter doesn’t always allow the company to reach the customers it is seeking, stating that users on the platform seem to be more interested in the entrepreneurial side of cannabis instead of commerce.

Twitter may be among the first platforms to allow some kind of cannabis advertising but stakeholders have reported mixed results.

Some users said their ads were taken down and accounts disabled mere hours after Twitter allowed cannabis advertisements.

The recent changes allow cannabis companies to show ads that feature product-specific content and promote their brands but do not allow pricing and offers of discounts, promotions, giveaways and contests.

With time, these restrictions could be eased further, giving cannabis companies a better chance of reaching their target markets and ramping up their production in tandem with the growing sales. As the sales of marijuana products increase, so could the sales of companies such as Advanced Container Technologies Inc. (OTC: ACTX), which are in the business of providing cultivation equipment to cannabis growers.

NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to Advanced Container Technologies Inc. (OTC: ACTX) are available in the company’s newsroom at https://cnw.fm/ACTX

Please see full terms of use and disclaimers on the CannabisNewsWire website applicable to all content provided by CNW420, wherever published or re-published: http://CNW.fm/Disclaimer