Standard agency contracts are written for industries without regulators. Six clauses matter more in cannabis than anywhere else, and most default agreements get all six wrong.
Most of the damage in an agency transition is self-inflicted and preventable. Here is the order of operations that protects rankings, data and compliance while you move.
You do not need to be a specialist to tell whether your agency is doing real work. Nine checks, most of them free, that expose the difference between activity...
The usual arguments about cost and control miss what actually decides this in cannabis: who carries compliance judgement, and whether you can hire it.
Every major platform prohibits paid cannabis advertising, and most restrict organic accounts too. Here is what is genuinely permitted, what gets accounts removed, and what to build instead.
If you sell grinders, software, packaging or consulting rather than cannabis itself, you are playing a different game with far fewer restrictions. Most ancillary brands never realise it.
Medical cannabis in Canada has no storefronts, no map pack and no walk-in customers. It runs on registration with a federally licensed seller, which makes it a completely different...
Three small provinces, three different retail structures, and a marketing reality most national plans get wrong. Here is how the Atlantic model actually works.
Manitoba runs a hybrid model that exists nowhere else: fully private retail, government wholesale through MBLL, and licensed producers delivering direct to stores. That changes who a brand actually...
Ottawa is an Ontario retail market with a border problem: Gatineau is fifteen minutes away and runs under Quebec rules. That single fact changes targeting, creative and measurement.
An LP sells to provincial boards, retail buyers and budtenders before it ever sells to a consumer. Most marketing agencies are built for the last of those and not...
Almost nobody in this category publishes rates, which makes proposals impossible to compare. Here is how cannabis agency pricing is actually structured and how to make competing quotes comparable.
CBD sits in a different regulatory box from recreational cannabis, and the marketing follows different rules. Here is who works in it and what separates CBD strategy from cannabis...
Retail cannabis is a local business with a national rulebook. These are the agencies working with Canadian dispensaries, and the specific things that decide whether a store gets found.
Age gates that block crawlers, menu platforms search engines cannot read, and payment processors that decline the category. Cannabis web build is a specialist job, and here is who...
Canadian cannabis packaging has to satisfy plain-packaging rules, a standardised warning, an excise stamp and provincial listing requirements — and still work on shelf. That is a design discipline...
Earned media is one of the few promotional channels the Cannabis Act does not close. Here are the PR firms working with Canadian cannabis brands, and what separates a...
Alberta has more private cannabis retail stores than any other province and the lowest legal age in the country. Both facts change what marketing works here.
Quebec bans almost all cannabis promotion, including things that are permitted elsewhere in Canada. This is what remains legal, what does not, and how marketing works when advertising mostly...
British Columbia sells roughly a fifth of Canada's cannabis through a provincial wholesale monopoly. Here is who markets in that market, and what the BCLDB structure changes about your...
A freelance specialist and an agency fail in different ways. Here is which failure you can afford, plus twelve questions that expose whether someone actually knows cannabis search.
Toronto has more cannabis retail competition than any other Canadian market — and a specific set of rules that shape what marketing is even permitted. Here is who works...
Which agencies serving Canadian cannabis brands actually publish an AEO or GEO practice — what they each claim, what nobody can yet prove, and how to test the claims...
A transparent comparison of the agencies that publicly state both a cannabis specialisation and Canadian coverage — with the method, the limits, and how to run your own selection...
A cross-case analysis of four restricted-market campaigns, highlighting repeated performance patterns and the limits of generalizing client results.
A plain-language guide to CPA, ROAS, LTV, margin, conversion quality, and metric selection for cannabis and CBD marketing.
A practical attribution architecture for cannabis, CBD, and other restricted-market campaigns where platform reporting is incomplete.
A compliance-aware conversion optimization framework for cannabis ecommerce and online retail journeys.
A governance model for cannabis website authors, medical reviewers, profile pages, approval records, corrections, and Article schema.
A reusable framework for source-backed cannabis content that is clear, attributable, and easy for people and machines to verify.
A practical explanation of Google’s official AI-search guidance, separated from speculative AEO and GEO tactics.
A scalable hub-and-child architecture for cannabis brands and retailers that avoids thin city-page duplication.
A practical local SEO scorecard for cannabis retailers, delivery services, and multi-location operators.
A week-by-week Canadian cannabis SEO plan covering technical foundations, commercial pages, local/entity signals, content, internal links, measurement, and authority.
A two-layer checklist for cannabis email and SMS: CASL consent and messaging requirements plus cannabis-promotion review.
A risk framework for testimonials, reviews, creators, affiliates, and user-generated cannabis content in Canada.
An editorial framework for useful cannabis education that remains distinct from personalized medical advice and unsupported product promotion.
A practical guide to explicit and implied health claims in CBD and cannabis marketing, including product pages, testimonials, educational content, and review triggers.
A marketing-oriented federal checklist based on Health Canada’s cannabis promotion guidance, with clear escalation points for legal review.
A Canada-specific comparison of SEO, paid search, email, and SMS for cannabis and CBD businesses, including policy, CASL, cost, speed, and measurement tradeoffs.
A dated timeline of Google’s Canadian cannabis ads pilot, what the announcement confirmed, what it did not confirm, and how to verify eligibility now.
A step-by-step CBD landing-page audit covering policy eligibility, claims, CRO, trust, mobile performance, checkout, and measurement.
A practical framework for separating account, ad, product, destination, claim, geography, and certification causes of cannabis or CBD ad disapprovals.
A source-backed explanation of Google’s general cannabis policy, the time-limited Canadian pilot, CBD rules, and the verification steps advertisers should complete in 2026.