Advertisers buy into cannabis marketing and this year's TV upfront market

In this week's Media Buying Briefing, available exclusively to Digiday+ members, senior media buying and planning editor Michael Bürgi explores how data has sparked new advertisers to buy into cannabis marketing.

In a recent Future of TV Briefing, another member exclusive, senior media editor Tim Peterson looks at how Amazon, Roku and YouTube stand to play a bigger role in this year’s upfront market after leveling up in the last couple years.

You can get a taste of these member-only features below and subscribe to Digiday+ to stay ahead with exclusive briefings, original research, reports and guides, tutorials, unlimited stories and much more.

Media Buying Briefing: Sparked up by data, new advertisers buy into cannabis marketing

By Michael Bürgi

Given the ubiquity of data across the media and marketing landscape, it was only a matter of time before cannabis-related marketing, and the media that serve up cannabis content got their data house in order.

And though the number of obstacles to the growing cannabis market opportunity still exist — a lack of national standards or acceptance, and a lingering sense among its purveyors that it’s still an underground business — the increasing sophistication of data aims to convince a wider swath of advertisers, CPG and QSR in particular, that cannabis consumers are worthy of being marketed to. And maybe they shouldn’t be seen just as “cannabis consumers.”

Digiday has learned that New Frontier Data (NFD), an analytics tech firm that specializes in the cannabis industry, struck a partnership deal with Smart, a programmatic platform that works with all manner of publishers, including cannabis content, to let Smart access a database of 160 million consumers via NFD’s NXTeck — an ad tech solution that packages cannabis-consuming audiences.

Subscribe to Digiday+ below to access the full briefing.

Future of TV Briefing: How Amazon, Roku and YouTube are figuring into this year’s TV upfront market

By Tim Peterson

In last year’s TV advertising upfront market, TV networks were willing to turn away linear TV ad dollars to move money to their respective streaming and digital properties. In this year’s upfront market, that move may come back to bite the networks. Some of that money did end up moving to streaming and digital, but it moved to other companies’ streaming and digital inventory and may not return to the TV networks given Amazon’s, Roku’s and YouTube’s rising roles in the upfront market, according to agency executives.

“We warned [the TV networks] last year: ‘Don’t overplay your hand because all your going to do is you’re going to force clients to shift money into some of these digital platforms that have great audiences, data, great measurement, great ability to prove that they’re reaching incremental audiences that you’re not reaching on TV. And once the money goes over, they’re not coming back,’” said one agency executive.

“People thought they could push money away, and it would just come back, and it doesn’t,” concurred a second agency executive.

Subscribe to Digiday+ below to access the full briefing.

Further reading

‘Still getting started’: Coca-Cola’s candid progress report on its in-house plan
Even the biggest and most lauded advertisers struggle with moving more marketing in-house. Coca-Cola is a case in point: two years into its own in-house plan, and it’s still very much a work in progress.

How Omnicom Media Group is making sense of clean room complexities
The programmatic advertising industry is transitioning from a cookie-based era to what could become the age of the clean room. Managing that transition isn’t so easy, though. Publishers are already feeling a little overwhelmed, and marketers are similarly beside themselves at the prospect of picking out where to plug their first-party data.

‘This is one thing that we all should be holding hands and charging towards’: How Pinterest’s Zeny Shifferaw is creating space for underrepresented creators
Zenash “Zeny” Shifferaw didn’t grow up playing with Barbie dolls. The 35-year-old California native was the child of Ethiopian immigrant parents who encouraged Shifferaw and her two siblings to instead build their own worlds, characters and stories through puppet shows.