It’s a big day for cannabis marketers. Effective immediately, social media giant Twitter will allow cannabis companies to advertise for CBD, THC, and cannabis-related products like delivery services, testing labs, and grow technology in the United States. Before this change, only topical CBD companies were allowed to advertise on the site.
The new guidelines require advertisers to be licensed and pre-authorized by Twitter. Companies can only target jurisdictions that they hold licenses in and must comply with all applicable laws around advertising guidelines, including not targeting customers under the age of twenty-one.
Here’s a big catch: Advertisers can’t promote or offer the sale of cannabis. So, as we’ve come to expect in the industry, companies are going to have to get creative. The previous exception allowing advertisements for non-ingestible CBD products remains in place.
“We applaud Twitter for its decision to start working with cannabis brands,” says Amy Deneson of the Cannabis Media Council. “Welcoming the cannabis sector to advertise is a good business decision. We are confident it will prove to be a significant revenue generator for Twitter and will show other mainstream publishers and platforms reliant on ad income that cannabis companies have money to spend and should be treated like other adult CPG brands.”
While exciting, we’re not particularly confident that this change will do much for the industry, especially when brought forth by Elon Musk, who consistently makes changes to the social media platform, including updating the algorithm when his tweets don’t perform to his liking or deleting entire functions of the website after journalists criticize him. But hey, we’ll hope for the best.
