AcuityAds on Cannabis Advertising

October 26, 2018

According to Statista, legal cannabis sales are projected to reach 23 billion USD by 2025 (up from 9.84 billion USD this year alone). It’s a no-brainer that cannabis industry digital advertising will be a powerful tool to capture consumer attention in this booming market as cannabis entrepreneurs continue to grow their brands.

We understand the advertising hurdles facing cannabis regulations, and we are here to help. Cannabis companies require sophisticated technology solutions to ensure that audiences are appropriately targeted. That’s why at AcuityAds, we pride ourselves on delivering multiple lines of defence with regards to brand safety, fraud prevention and age-gating/LDA compliancy to deliver proactive protection and risk mitigation.

 

AcuityAds In-House Brand Safety

Our best-in-class protection requires top-notch tech and brand safety expertise. AcuityAds has multiple layers of defense in terms of brand safety and fraud for pre-campaign and in-flight protection, and post-campaign verification. The Acuity Platform technology uses Fraudlogix for built-in capability to eliminate fraud and IVT (invalid traffic) including bot fraud, human click farms & iFraming units. This partnership also allows our technology to score traffic and content.

While in-flight we use Peer39 for IP filtering and enablement of global and industry wide advertiser white / blacklists and MOAT as a preferred partner for achieving viewability KPIs. Furthermore, we are able to overlay ad verification tools including attribution and foot traffic studies via comScore vCE, Nielsen OCR, Integral Ad Science and others. We are dedicated to protecting a brand’s reputation, demonstrated by our long list of direct deals with premium “cannabis approved” publishers, including USAToday / Gannett, Seattle Times, Topix, LifeDaily, theChive, and more.

Age-Gating and LDA Compliance

The AcuityAds age targeting tactic is based on ComScore’s Age Targeting, which is embedded directly into our Platform. We also work directly with numerous publishers and ad exchanges who provide us with whitelists of “LDA (Legal Drinking Age) Compliant” sites to mitigate brand risk.

In addition to Acuity Platform built in age targeting and whitelists, the platform algorithm is capable of calling on 1st, 2nd or 3rd party data segments collected from any database. Using our machine learning algorithm, we determine the propensity of unique individuals to be relevant to your campaign and select those to target based on a combination of variables that define a campaign’s target. This allows our technology to locate the most relevant users and bid on traffic accurately.

Creative & Contextual Guidelines

There are a number of organizations that work to set out standards to guide advertisers on their quest to advertise digitally. Those specific to the advertising industry include the IAB, OBA, DAA, and others; then there are national bodies such as Health Canada and the FDA. We are here to ensure that you are in compliance with these governing bodies and we work to partner when necessary and educate our teams to ensure everything that we assist in running is in full compliance with the industry.* AcuityAds uses strict contextual targeting that guarantees that your ads are never running alongside objectionable content or within any unsavory content that might cause mis-perception or mis-guided understanding of the content of the ad. It is our promise to work closely with your team to provide two-way communication & feedback in order to ensure your campaign’s success.

What Our Clients Are Saying

“AcuityAds ran campaigns for Kim Crawford Wines, Svedka Vodka, and several of our Wine & Spirits brands. It is so important to work with people you can trust for digital campaigns that must follow strict targeting guidelines, like those for legal drinking age users. In three years working with AcuityAds we felt confident that our digital spending was being taken care of. We always received positive feedback from clients, AcuityAds made us look good!” – Jennifer Will, Constellation Brands, Bensimon Byrne

* Please note: Clients are responsible for their own creative, and they should have it reviewed by their own legal/compliance team before sending to Acuity.