Stephen Gold, Owner of The Gold Standard – Interview Series

Just like in any other sector, marketing is a crucial component of the cannabis industry. However, given the strict advertising prohibitions on major digital platforms like Meta and Google, cannabis brands must be incredibly clever and resourceful with their strategies. To complicate matters, shifting consumer sales trends can wax and wane, directly impacting the effectiveness of those marketing efforts.

Fortunately, it helps immensely to work with a marketing firm or manager who possesses deep expertise in this highly specialized niche, built over many years and across multiple state markets. For a closer look at the common roadblocks of cannabis advertising and what makes marketing in this industry so unique, mycannabis.com had the pleasure of speaking with Stephen Gold, Owner of The Gold Standard.

So what topics did you mainly study at Purchase College? What student organizations were you involved with?

Going to an art school, I got exposed to a really wide range of skills, mostly centered on Arts Management and New Media. I took classes in Photoshop and InDesign, music theory, business strategy, photography, and website development, back when there was no AI to build them for you. For my senior project, a friend and I actually created an album, got it published, and put it on Spotify. It’s still up there to this day, and I’m convinced we’ve got a hit single just waiting to be discovered.

What were the most universally useful lessons in sales and marketing that you learned while at Tom Cody Design? How did those lessons prove their usefulness across the numerous industries you’ve worked with?

My boss taught me to always look out for people, like helping someone land a job at a company you know. He drilled into me that it’s good to have allies, and that when you’re genuinely good to people, they remember you. Honestly, I wasn’t the most knowledgeable guy about textile design, but I was consistently a top earner for the company because I had passion and I actually cared about the people I was meeting with. Relationships go a long way. That’s when it clicked for me: when you’re selling, you’re not really selling the product – you’re selling yourself. And it turns out that translates to any industry. Whether I was talking fabric swatches back then or cannabis marketing today, people don’t buy from a company, they buy from someone they trust. Same game, different product. I’ve carried those principles with me ever since. They’re a big reason I’ve been able to hire some of the best people I’ve worked with over the years for Gold Standard, and help place great people at companies around me too.

When did you first start working with cannabis businesses, and what were those first roles you held? Did you have any concerns about working with cannabis companies originally?

When I moved out west in 2014, cannabis wasn’t really an “industry” yet, not the way it is now. There weren’t many jobs. Oregon was the third state to legalize, but it wasn’t fully legal when I got there, so I started networking and meeting people on the medical side of the business. Almost every operation was a one or two man show, and they didn’t have much use for a sales manager from NYC. hat they really needed was someone who understood the supply chain and could help move product from southern Oregon to dispensaries in Portland. It wasn’t easy telling my mom I’d just quit a job making over $100k to go drive weed up and down the state.

So I found a way to create my own lane out of necessity. I was using Leafly at the time to find good medical deals, and I noticed their deals section was all text, and half the time those cheap-weed ads turned out to be low-quality product. So I combined the feel of scrolling Instagram with cannabis deals and built The Daily Leaf. It let me, as a consumer, actually find products I wanted to buy, and it helped a lot of other people do the same. So my first real role in cannabis? Founder and developer of a marketing platform built to help a brand new industry find its footing.

What were the most exciting and worthwhile parts of organizing events and trade shows at the cleverly named Fore Twenty Sports? What were the most glowing reviews that you received about Fore Twenty Sports’ events and the organization’s philanthropic efforts too?

Fore Twenty Sports was a blast! The most exciting part was the genuine connections we helped build through our events. The companies that came together for our B2B events always told me how worthwhile they were, that they’d walked in to make business connections and walked out with actual friendships. That was the best feedback I could ask for. With our golf tournament, we always picked a charity to give back to through the games. We raised money for nonprofits like Freedom Grow, where we were able to put money on the books for people locked up for nonviolent cannabis crimes.

Through your work with first The Daily Leaf and Weedmaps and now The Gold Standard, what are the largest differences between East Coast cannabis markets and West Coast markets? Do some West Coast businesses have more requirements and issues regarding sales and marketing than East Coast businesses, or vice versa?

Every state is different, since cannabis law varies state by state. These days I wouldn’t really call it an East Coast versus West Coast thing, but some states are just more heady than others. You can tell their legal programs were built differently, and maybe that comes down to being early adopters. States like Oregon, Maine, and Michigan, while not wildly different on advertising rules (though there are differences on what’s allowed and what isn’t), feel like they were built with a deeper appreciation for the plant and cannabis culture. Those programs started before there was a “green rush,” back when the people growing the weed and doing the hard work did it because they loved the plant and took pride in making great product.

Fast forward to a state like New York and its rollout, and even though there are plenty of people involved who genuinely care about weed, it feels a lot more manufactured and corporate. That makes sense, though. It’s a real business and industry now, where before it was just getting started. Either way, there are marketing nuances operators have to stay on top of. In New Jersey there are limits on when you can run commercials, in New York you can’t have billboards over a certain size, and in Massachusetts it’s still really tough to even use the word “deals.”

When a new dispensary opens, what are the largest marketing and sales-related issues and roadblocks that they usually face? How do you and The Gold Standard help them solve those issues in ways that are effective and, most importantly, compliant with their state regulators?

I’d say retention is one of the hardest things a new business faces. There are so many options for where to buy weed, and in a lot of states the product is basically the same. You’ve got shoppers who are pure “deals” shoppers, bouncing from one shop to the next chasing the cheapest price, and they’ve got zero loyalty. What we do at Gold Standard is set a dispensary up with the best possible shot at keeping that customer and building their lifetime value.

It starts before the store even opens. We work with them to build a loyalty program, so when that very first customer walks in to make a purchase, the staff is trained to let them know there’s a 20% coupon waiting in their inbox if they sign up. We work behind the scenes to make sure the staff knows how to enroll customers, what the redemption levels are, and we create the materials that go into every single bag. If we can get that customer back through the door a second time within a week or two, we’re helping them start a habit of making this their go-to store.

The goal is to keep the customer feeling valued at all times, and not just with a discount, but in other ways too, like they’re part of the family at this new dispensary. Once we’ve got that foundation, the other marketing tactics we run to bring new people in actually stick, the lifetime value keeps growing, and the business has a real chance to compete with the shop 1,000 feet down the road.

The catch with all of this is that none of it means anything if it’s not compliant. Every state has its own rulebook on what you can say, how you can say it, and who you’re even allowed to say it to. A loyalty text that’s totally fine in one state can put a license at risk in another. So before anything goes out, whether it’s that welcome coupon, a promo, or an email blast, we check it against that state’s specific regulations. We’d rather pump the brakes on a campaign than let an operator gamble their license on a marketing win. That’s the part a lot of people overlook, but for us it’s non-negotiable. You can’t build lifetime value if the doors get shut for a compliance violation.

As someone who’s worked in sales and marketing for other fields, why is the cannabis industry so unique when compared to fashion or music marketing?

Honestly, I don’t think it’s that unique anymore. It’s not as different from fashion or music as people assume, and there’s even more crossover with beer, wine, and spirits. A lot of the same tactics carry right over. I’ve seen so many professionals come from those worlds and build successful careers in cannabis, working for some of the biggest national brands out there. The one thing I’ll say is that to really make it in this industry, you have to love the plant and not just be chasing an exit. Nine times out of ten you won’t make it if that’s your only motivation, though we all know there are exceptions to that rule. If anything, the real uniqueness still comes down to how hard it is for these businesses to operate legally, which complicates everything about how they grow.

Given your many years of experience in the specific field, what are the most profound ways that the field of cannabis marketing has changed since state industries first started forming?

I think it really took a turn during COVID, when customers suddenly needed to place orders online. When I first started in cannabis, a dispensary didn’t have a Google Business Profile and wasn’t taking pre-orders through their website. Dutchie wasn’t a thing yet. Point of sale software wasn’t in every store. That’s exactly what made Weedmaps and Leafly flourish in the early years. There was no way to see products online, so those third-party platforms gave someone like me a way to know what I could buy before I even walked in the door.

Then COVID hit, and now I couldn’t just walk into the store, look at the product, and make my purchase. I had to order ahead. Dispensaries had to make it easy to order online, and the boom really started from there. Today a dispensary can make it or break it on whether they show up at the top of the search for “dispensary near me.”

The other profound shift is that we can finally measure ROI. In the early days, marketing was mostly a guessing game. You’d run a promo or put up a billboard and just hope it worked, with no real way to prove it did. Now that a dispensary has a website and ecommerce set up, you can tie sales directly back to marketing efforts. We can see where traffic is coming from, track which campaigns actually drove purchases, and put a real number on what’s working and what isn’t. That changes everything. Instead of spending on a hunch, an operator can put their dollars where the data points, and that’s a world away from where we started.

Looking into the future of the American cannabis industry, what are the largest ways that the field of cannabis marketing will change? Do you ever envision platforms like Meta and Google becoming more open to cannabis advertising on their platforms?

100%, Meta and Google will eventually come around. There’s too much money in it for them not to, and I feel like that day is coming soon. Brands and dispensaries are already finding compliant ways to get around the current restrictions on these platforms. Look, this is going to turn, and cannabis will become just another corporate advertising engine, the same way Pepsi and Coke run their playbooks. And when it does, it’s the businesses that know how to work that engine best that are going to win. That’s exactly where Gold Standard is positioned. We know the tactics, we’re ready for the shift, and we stay a step ahead so our clients are in the best possible spot to win when it happens.

Thank you for joining us, Stephen! For more information on The Gold Standard, please visit its website.