Cannacurio Podcast Episode 41 with Chris Cohen of Square Grouper 360

Square Grouper 360 President Chris Cohen is a strategiest for large mainstream media companies helping them streamline advertising sales for the cannabis and hemp industries. Recently, Chris joined Ed Keating to talk about his work with MNI Targeted Media and how he uses the Cannabiz Media database to support their sales and business development initiatives.

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Cannacurio Podcast Episode 41 Transcript

Ed Keating:

This is the Cannacurio podcast by Cannabiz Media, your source for cannabis and hemp license news directly from the data vault. I’m your host, Ed Keating, and today we’re joined by Chris Cohen, president of Square Grouper 360. Chris, welcome.

Chris Cohen:

Hello there.

Ed Keating:

Glad to have you on. Haven’t seen you since Las Vegas. Lot’s happened in the last couple of months but the top story of the hour is Weedmaps was trying to get in on the Super Bowl, trying to figure out advertising and marketing, and it looks like the networks probably shut them down. Given your background, I’d love to hear your take on it.

Chris Cohen:

Yeah. My background is I was in broadcast television for 15 years. 10 of those are management. I worked for big companies, Cox, Fox, Sinclair. I have a really good television background, and I’ve been in cannabis the last 12 years. I definitely have that background. I actually talked to Weedmaps about how they should go about their tact, and the networks are never going to let them on. They’re never going to let a cannabis commercial on national.

One way they might be able to do it is to call the local affiliates and advertise in cities instead of nationally. That’s maybe one way around it. I love the commercial. I thought the creative was great. It was not offensive. They could have run that commercial, no problem. The networks aren’t going to budge until banking budges. Until we get banking, the networks aren’t going to look at anything we’re doing.

Ed Keating:

That makes sense. Well, I appreciate your perspective with bringing in the television and the cannabis side of things. If you could, could you tell us a little bit more about Square Grouper 360 and your relation to MNI Targeted Media? Because you’ve obviously been doing some great things there and I’d love to hear more about it.

Chris Cohen:

Definitely. I was in the cannabis space. I was an early adopter. I started in 2009 out in California.

Ed Keating:

Wow.

Chris Cohen:

Was really part of that legacy group that got legalization through in California that went to all the county commissioners in every single city and every single town and every county, the city commissioners, educating them on the industry from like 2011 to 2014, to really get that momentum to where we are today. I owned a couple of companies. A manufacturing company, a cultivation company.

Ed Keating:

Wow.

Chris Cohen:

Ended up selling those in 2019. I really saw the writing on the wall in California. Being in the industry so early, I was able to really forecast what was going to happen, and I knew it was going to be a tough run and so I figured, “Let me get out.” I had an offer to get out from a Canadian company. I went ahead and sold and I said, “I can always get back in, in the future when things get a little better.”

I’ve been consulting since. What I did is I took my TV background and my cannabis background, and someone put me in front of MNI, who I knew of from my television days. I used to sell against them. Yeah. I started doing some research on them, and they spent three years working in the cannabis space, really trying to figure out what the needs were, but they were struggling navigating the industry.

Like so many people from outside the industry, it’s so hard to navigate, and so they brought me on to help them navigate the waters and get the message out what they’re trying to sell to everybody.

Ed Keating:

What did you do differently? How did your approach differ? Because obviously you had this decade of experience and anybody who’s listening to this podcast has heard me talk about the canna-clueless, canna-curious, canna-serious. As people just get smarter about the industry they move into that canna-serious level, and I’m assuming that’s probably where you’ve brought them now. What changes did you make and what was your approach, Chris?

Chris Cohen:

I’ll be honest. The first thing I did, you’re going to love this answer, I brought on Cannabiz Media.

Ed Keating:

I love that answer.

Chris Cohen:

I know. I’ve known about you since you started. I’ve been in the industry for a while. I knew exactly what you did, and they were having a hard time navigating the licenses. They also have 25 account executives across the country.

Ed Keating:

Wow.

Chris Cohen:

They couldn’t tell where companies were headquartered, who to assign what accounts or what rep. We went ahead and got on your platform, and I really started putting lists together for every account executive across the country. Where are all these companies headquartered? Also, MNI’s a little picky. They’re not picky, but their platforms are not cheap. Spending $1,500 a month with them probably isn’t going to work.

It’s really more of a $7,500, $10,000 a month spend. That knocks out a lot of the smaller cannabis companies. They were calling on those small cannabis companies and getting nowhere because their buy-in was so large. I really took your platform. I knew who a lot of the players were already and then playing in the platform, figuring out how many states they’re in. I was able to put account lists together for the reps.

Ed Keating:

In terms of MNI, who are they trying to reach? Who do they want to get on their platform, I guess, from the cannabis industry as advertisers? It doesn’t sound like it would be a store. Would it be a chain or an MSO, or is it a brand? Who is their ideal customer, if they were to walk in and join us on this call right now?

Chris Cohen:

The way I did it, I really separated out. For dispensaries, for retail, multiple locations, any dispensary with multiple locations anywhere in the country is a definite because they usually spend about $5,000 each per location. Having [inaudible 00:05:25] with multiple locations would be a target. Brands are a big target of ours right now, especially all these brands that are going direct to consumer online.

They need traffic to those websites and that’s what MNI does the best. That’s really our big focus right now is the brands going direct to consumer. We also target delivery companies. We’ve had big success with the online companies. The big tech companies are doing business with us. Dutchie and Eaze are two big clients of ours.

Ed Keating:

Got it. Got it.

Chris Cohen:

Yeah. And we-

Ed Keating:

Yeah. That makes sense. I imagine you can sort of get into almost like the geofencing kind of thing too if you’re trying to reach a certain cohort or whatnot. You’ve got the technology and whatnot to bring that in. In terms of MNI’s use of Cannabiz Media, you talked about essentially helping build territories.

Do you ever run into situations where I guess for MNI they’ve got some that are house accounts or basically named accounts versus those who are local. How do they view the sales world in terms of how they deploy their sales force?

Chris Cohen:

It’s really based on territories. They have 25 reps around the country. They’re based in all the big cities and it’s all territories. If a company is headquartered in California, the California rep has this.

Ed Keating:

Got it.

Chris Cohen:

Basically since it’s so spread out, we do it where the headquarters are, is how I assign it.

Ed Keating:

Got it.

Chris Cohen:

Instead of where their locations are. It’s where the headquarters are.

Ed Keating:

Well, and that’s where the sale’s going to get done, because you want to be selling at the C level, not chasing around every store and going to every manager. Okay. That makes sense.

Chris Cohen:

Turnover has been so massive in the cannabis industry. Really we want to talk with the top people because they’re not leaving. MNI spent an enormous … I know all the companies are spending a lot of time with buyers that leave after three/four months and you start all over.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Yeah. You do.

Chris Cohen:

Really getting above that level is really important.

Ed Keating:

That’s great. That’s great. You’re right, because one of the things that we track in the product is when we do our phone calling, one of the things that we ask in addition to store size and whatnot is who’s the purchasing manager and what are the best hours to reach them? We have that in the app as like a news story for a lot of the stores, but those names change.

We call again, it’s like, “Oh, it’s not Chris anymore. It’s Ed.” It’s definitely trying to keep up on the change and the dynamism in the industry.

Chris Cohen:

Yeah.

Ed Keating:

One other area I always like to ask in our podcast is sort of the strategy piece point of differentiation. If you go to a cannabis trade show, there’s a lot of media brands out there that are all fighting for share of wallet. There’s a million magazines. There’s still lots of shows that are trying to come back in. There’s lots of ways to spend that marketing and advertising dollar.

What makes MNI Targeted Media stand apart from the crowd? Because based on what you said before, you’ve got some real marquee clients. Obviously something’s resonating. Help us understand that.

Chris Cohen:

There are a lot of companies out there, and I’ve actually taken the task and met with a lot of them because I want to know what they’re doing. We’ve actually partnered with a couple of companies. We’ve done data integrations with Fyllo. We’ve done data integration with New Frontier. Even with meeting with the competitors, we find out there’s actually some synergy between us a lot of the times.

Ed Keating:

Oh, great.

Chris Cohen:

I think the biggest thing is with MNI, this is a really big company. They’re owned by Dotdash Meredith. They were owned by Meredith and now Dotdash bought them. Dotdash Meredith is a massive company. They’re a top 10 company in the world for website traffic to all their sites. The only ones bigger than them is Microsoft, Amazon, and a couple of others. They own all the magazines.

Their People magazine, all the TIME magazines, Sports Illustrated, and tons of websites, liquor.com, health websites, Investopedia. They have massive platforms. I think that’s the differentiating point with MNI. This is a really big company. This is a massive company in the space. MNI is our online targeting division, national division, but this is a big company that brings big tools to the industry for cannabis.

Ed Keating:

I imagine too big data too. I know that’s a word that a lot of people throw around, but if you’ve got brands like that, you’re touching a lot of households, I would imagine, and just have more data than most, I would think, with that kind of reach.

Chris Cohen:

The amount of zero-party and first-party data is huge. We have so much of that data, and that’s why the integrations with the cannabis companies have been so important. Because we have that zero and first-party data, integrating it with cannabis information and really being able to target these customers on a granular level has been really successful for us. I think that’s what it is.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Some of the other things that we talked to previously are the depth of the advertiser relationships you have and also this concept of digital-first e-commerce. The whole being digital, not just print-focused, I’m assuming. Could you drill into those a little bit more in terms of how they relate to the success?

Chris Cohen:

Yeah. We’re extremely digitally focused and print is a big part of this company, but everything’s moving digital and everything’s moving online, especially for the cannabis companies, digital’s perfect. One thing MNI has done, they spent three years building a programmatic platform where they went to publishers all over the world and leaned on them basically.

This is a big company that said, “Hey, we need you to take our cannabis clients. As long as the creative is okay, we need you to take it.” They went around and they got 15,000 publishers around the world-

Ed Keating:

Wow.

Chris Cohen:

… to pre-approve cannabis advertising. I think that’s the big differentiator that MNI has over everyone. They have a massive customized platform for cannabis.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. That sounds like just a giant network of places where you can put ads and not remnants, but ads.

Chris Cohen:

It’s not small. It’s every website, but there’s big websites. It’s Fox Sports, CBS Sports is on there, VICE. There’s big publishers on there also. We can definitely target in so many ways. I think that’s the difference MNI. We can really granular target on it, target on a granular level where some of our competitors can’t.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Chris Cohen:

We’re actually offering this platform to perceived competitors. I don’t think there’s any competitors. I think we’re all providing a service. We’re starting to offer this platform to some of the other agencies.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. When I used to work in the publishing advertising space, I know that one of our members had a network that was pretty unique.

By bringing together, actually it was all business trade magazines, they were able to build enough of a network where they could finally bring in big advertisers like I think Mercedes-Benz because now you could give enough of the audience of a highly wealthy B2B audience and show those kind of ads. Good for you guys for building out a platform. I’m sure that’s a great asset to have.

Chris Cohen:

They actually spent three years on it before they even rolled it out. This wasn’t something they rolled out in pieces. They really did it right. Put it together and rolled it out.

Ed Keating:

You talked about some of the others in the industry that may benefit from this. Over the last six, eight weeks there have been a couple of acquisitions in this space where MJBizDaily, Marijuana Business Daily got bought by Emerald, Green Market Report was acquired by Crain’s. Do you expect to see more of these deals? Because you’re sort of at a unique catbird seat to the industry in terms of advertising and marketing.

Chris Cohen:

I think those two are really almost outliers. They were so big, they were ready to be acquired. Green Market Report does such a good job. They both have really great niches is what it is, and they have big followings. They were prime for that. I think there’s going to be more of that coming in the future. I don’t know who it’s going to be. I’m really looking more at the Weedmaps, the Lit Leafs and some of these other companies, because I think they’re the ones that might be in play soon.

Ed Keating:

Oh, interesting. Interesting. Yeah.

Chris Cohen:

Yeah. I do.

Ed Keating:

There’s a couple of private companies too that have gotten pretty good valuations and may be a war chest. We’ll have to see because the bloom seems to be off the [inaudible 00:13:43] rose these days. It may be a more traditional approach to combining companies. We’ll have to see.

Chris Cohen:

I think you’re going to see a lot of M&A in the cannabis industry this year. As far as the media side, I think that’s going to come. Yeah. I mean, there’s going to be so much M&A this year.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. I think so. We have a database that’s tracking it now. I think we’re just under 500 deals that we’ve managed to cover in the last four or five years. Most of them are the last two/three years, but it’s been really interesting to see and that’s more on people buying licenses, but we also track the ancillary pieces as well.

We’ll be keeping an eye on those too because it’s fascinating to watch, for me, how the software stack is starting to collapse a bit. You don’t need 80 point-of-sale vendors out there. In the end there’s probably going to be five, three, two. We’ll see. It’ll take some time to get there.

Chris Cohen:

Agree.

Ed Keating:

Now, one of the other big trends that I think is interesting and really a lot of it comes from my background in compliance, is similar to pharma, there’s a lot of compliance around cannabis advertising and marketing. I’m curious how you handle that, especially with all the work that MNI has done in terms of three years of work in building a network, how do you manage that?

Because I know here in Connecticut, when they first released their rules and regs, it was like a 16-page PDF that looked like it came right out of Federal Trade Commission. I mean, lots of rules and regs. How do you manage that at scale, Chris?

Chris Cohen:

It is not easy. The one good thing about being with MNI, this is a really big company and they have a big marketing department. The marketing department’s actually put together a state by state advertising guide and we keep up on it. We spent the time and went in and put out … When we go to an advertiser, we know what’s going on in that state. It’s not, “Let’s get a deal done and figure it out.” It’s, “This is what you can and can’t do.”

I’ll give you a great example. I ran into an issue on Maine last week, I was on a call with a company in Maine with my rep and we realized they changed the laws, no online advertising. Maine’s got no online advertising. We couldn’t believe it. There’s workarounds, but this is really backwards. This is how far behind some of these regulatory bodies are in the states. How do they expect a cannabis company to succeed if they can’t advertise?

It’s really been difficult for us to comprehend that. The barriers are difficult to advertise and that’s got to change. The only way these companies are going to be able to compete is advertising. Every other category is allowed to do it. Why not cannabis? One thing we do is we keep on the state-by-state rules, but I’ve made some calls to some of the county commissioners and the city commissioners trying to get things changed. My prior life I did a lot of that.

I think my future life, there’s going to be a lot of that. There needs to be a lobbying arm to help these cannabis advertising rules with the cities and the states. They don’t get it. It’s just a matter of getting in front of them and educating them. That’s something I might take on here in the future.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. I think there is a Cannabis Marketing Association that is on our radar screen. I could see that maybe falling into their purview.

Chris Cohen:

We’re members of CMA. We love working with them. They definitely do a lot of work on that end, but it’s tough. I mean, it goes down to cities almost. You can have one city that bans advertising and the city right next door is okay with it. There’s no structure to it. There’s no consistency. That’s what makes it tough too.

Ed Keating:

God forbid you put an ad on the side of a bus and it goes from a town where it’s legal to where it’s not. It just creates havoc to comply.

Chris Cohen:

The problem is the clients get nervous because they can lose their license. I mean, they’ve put in their whole life into this cannabis industry, they’ve put in everything and it makes them hesitant to advertise, because they’re scared about getting their license either pulled or suspended or over-advertising. It makes it a little tough for us at times also.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. I remember one of the first interviews I did was with Yahoo Finance Online a couple of years ago. We came up just by doing the research on a book we wrote on the 10 weirdest wackiest rules and regulations. A lot of them were around advertising. Like what font you could use on the sign, what colors, no neon in certain states or the sign couldn’t be on after a certain hour.

In Washington D.C., you couldn’t operate a cannabis business along with a gas station because why? I have no idea, but that was in the rule books. I don’t know if it’s still there, but it definitely makes it a challenge for people to comply with. Sadly, it’s something that people can really run afoul of if they’re not careful.

Chris Cohen:

Yeah. I think the cannabis industry talks to the county commissioners, the city commissioners, the regulatory bodies on big-picture items. They just don’t talk to them about advertising. It’s really down on the list is what it is. That just needs to come up higher on the list than we talked about. I think all those rules and regs will change over the next couple of years. I think they’re going to get easier. They really will.

Ed Keating:

I think you’re right. As these things become more main stream and normal. Totally agree. Now, in terms of advertising and marketing trends, sort of building out of the compliance side, what should we be looking for in the next year or so? What do you see once again from your perch?

Chris Cohen:

I’m actually going to defer to MNI on this. MNI puts out a lot of blogs. They put a blog out the beginning of the year on five trends to look for this year.

Ed Keating:

Wow.

Chris Cohen:

I want to go through them.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Let’s hear them.

Chris Cohen:

Yeah. Personalization in digital marketing, zero and first-party data. That’s a big trend. Accumulating as much zero and first-party data as you can before the cookieless world. Data visualization is another big trend, infographic stories. Instead of banner ads, video ads, going on video ads online. That’s a big trend. Consumer privacy, that’s on everything. That’s a massive trend.

I mean, now everyone’s dealing with that. AI and the widespread adoption of AI is a big trend that we’re seeing everywhere. Yeah. The last one is QR code marketing, which was all over the Super Bowl. I don’t know if you noticed this weekend. There was huge-

Ed Keating:

Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

Chris Cohen:

Everywhere. QR code marketing. I think that’s the biggest one on the list that I see it everywhere now. I think it’s made things really easy for the consumer. I mean, just ding and it takes you right where you need to go. Every commercial, I mean, most of the commercials in the Super Bowl, I was stunned.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. No. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. That’s great. Now going back to MNI, what are their goals for 2022?

Chris Cohen:

I think the biggest goals are they’re new to the cannabis industry. They’re not a legacy operator; they’ve been in here a couple of years. I think they’ve spent more time on the category than they have being in the category, which is what you need to do. They’re prepared, but it’s really continue establishing relationships, establishing those partners, those long-term partnerships.

Email, continue using email marketing. We use Cannabiz Media exclusively for email marketing. One thing that we’ve noticed is the email blasts to a thousand people really aren’t working anymore. We’ve gotten more personal. We’re doing one-to-one outreach now instead of blast outreach. We’re doing both, but really concentrating on one-to-one outreach and it’s really working getting appointments.

Personalized emails. Showing that you actually looked at the website and know a little bit about the company’s business before reaching out to them makes a huge difference.

Ed Keating:

Great. Now … Oh, I’m sorry. Go on.

Chris Cohen:

Oh, I was done. Go ahead.

Ed Keating:

The other question I wanted to ask that I often ask is Cannabiz Media covers cannabis, but also hemp CBD. Where does CBD come in for you guys? If at all.

Chris Cohen:

We actually made a pivot the end of the year, last year. We’re like, “Let’s really take a look at the CBD category.” We felt the cannabis category is a little stalled right now. It’s a little slow right now. Wish it was … And California is really making it tough. We don’t do a lot of California business because the companies out there are really struggling and they’re not putting a lot in advertising right now. We’re like, “Let’s take a look at CBD.”

One of the reasons we want to take a look at it, they’re in a two-year window right now that cannabis was in, in 2017 to 2019. Very little regulation, very little taxes. It’s a way to really get your business going before regulation comes. We need to pivot, and we started using your database, start reaching out to CBD companies.

We’re looking all the retailers of course, but really the brands is the big one. Anybody who’s got a website selling a line is a target of ours.

Ed Keating:

Oh, excellent. Well, and I was going to say having compiled some of the CBD retailers myself working with the team, it’s fascinating when you look at a Florida, Louisiana, and you just sort of sort them by name, you start to see really familiar names. In Florida, if I remember, Publix Super Markets and Walmart, I think, and Dixie are the big chains. Those companies are well-versed in how to work with CBD … or I’m sorry, consumer packaged goods, CPG. CBD.

They know how to bring in new products, and there’s a whole way to get your product on the shelves in those stores. For people who’ve got that consumer packaged goods background, making that entree is perhaps not as hard as maybe getting into a dispensary where there’s limited shelf and it’s a smaller kind of business, et cetera.

Chris Cohen:

I agree. You have so many more shelves you can get on. That’s so limited in the cannabis, is limited really to dispensaries. Then when you get into CBD, it’s gas stations to Sephora, to any retailer, really. Any. The pet category in CBD is massive. If you go into Petco, you go into PetSmart, there’s a whole aisle now.

Ed Keating:

Well, yeah. I think it’s Florida and Louisiana have really gotten out ahead of everybody. My favorite license in almost the whole database is in Florida there is a CBD alligator meat license holder. You can really get very niche. If you have any advertisers that need to reach that group, you got Cannabiz Media to lead the way.

Chris Cohen:

You can infuse anything. That’s what’s crazy about the CBD cannabis industry. I owned a manufacturing company. I know that you can infuse anything and I think you’re going to see niche products like that coming out in the future.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Well, listen, Chris, thanks so much for joining us on today’s podcast. I’m your host, Ed Keating, stay tuned for more updates from the data vault.