Dan Serard, CRO of Cannabis Creative – Interview Series

While it may seem highly unlikely on paper, successful cannabis marketing methods share a decent number of similarities with advertising approaches in other industries. Whether it’s a convenient location, meeting a customer’s specific needs, or building appeal and desire for a company’s products and services, marketing shares universal aspects across business types, regardless of federal legality.

For a deeper look into those many similarities between cannabis businesses and also some predictions about how cannabis marketing regulations and company policies could change if a federal reform were to be implemented, mycannabis.com had the pleasure of speaking with Dan Serard, CRO of Cannabis Creative.

What subjects did you mainly study at the University of New Hampshire? How did you turn your studies into a career in cannabis advertising?

I studied Recreation Management and Policy with a business minor. I’ll be honest, I can’t point to a single class that built my career. But the degree matters more than the syllabus. What I took from it was how to program an experience for people and keep them coming back, which turned into running health clubs, which turned into understanding memberships, retention, and lifetime value. That’s the same math that runs a dispensary.

The cannabis part came from my personal life, not a textbook. I grew up with a passion for the plant. So when Massachusetts went adult-use, I already understood the consumer in a way you can’t study for, and I had the business operating experience to go with it. The combination is the whole thing. Neither half alone gets you here.

How did working in marketing and advertising for gyms and fitness centers help you better understand those fields and how to appeal to customers most effectively? What were some pretty universally successful advertising strategies you developed in this role?

Three things, and one of them is the reason I’m good at this job.

First, channels. I helped manage the agency running marketing for our health clubs, so I learned Google Ads, Meta, and SEO from the client side, which means I learned what bad agency reporting looks like before I ever sat on the agency side of the table.

Second, brand building. I helped launch a couple of supplement brands from zero (naming, packaging, web, go-to-market). When you build a consumer product from nothing, you stop treating branding as decoration.

But the strategy that transferred was partnerships. Both clubs sat inside corporate buildings with dozens of other businesses in them. I went and built relationships with those owners and set up referral programs to bring their employees into the gym. That’s it. No ad spend. Just relationships engineered into a repeatable pipeline. I’ve been running a version of that play ever since and today it’s a referral network of 20+ partner organizations feeding our agency.

Who are some notable brands you’ve worked with at CHAMP Digital? How have you worked most effectively with a company and helped build their success, regardless of industry?

We work with both ends of the spectrum, and the relationships aren’t what people assume. Some of the largest MSOs in the world are actually smaller engagements. This could be a defined project, or helping an internal team get something off the ground. A lot of those companies have marketing departments bigger than our entire agency. They don’t lack people. They lack a specific skill set, and they need it fast.

Notable names in and out of cannabis: TripAdvisor, LesserEvil, NuEra, iAnthus, Fine Fettle, Royal Blunts, and others.

The thing that works regardless of industry is refusing to lead with tactics. We start by learning the business model and how the customer actually shops, what the margin structure is, what’s legally off the table. Then we build. An agency that shows up with a template is guessing, and the client can always tell.

Even though they’re not cannabis brands, what advertising and marketing-related issues do the brands under CHAMP Digital’s umbrella often deal with? How does CHAMP solve them?

Every industry has its own version of the same constraint, and the job is to find it before you spend a dollar. We do a lot of work in CPG food and beverage, and those products have strict rules about what claims they can and can’t make on packaging and in advertising (health claims, structure-function claims, ingredient language). It’s remarkably similar to cannabis. Different regulator, same discipline.

So the solution isn’t a cannabis playbook or a CPG playbook. It’s a process: dig into the business, map the restrictions, then find the creative angle that lives inside them. Once you’ve done that in one regulated category, you can do it in any of them. Constraints don’t kill campaigns. Not knowing the constraints does.

What inspired you to move from the well-established world of fitness marketing/advertising to the mostly uncharted world of cannabis advertising? Did you have any initial concerns about entering that sector of the cannabis industry?

I took a risk. I’d had a “passion” for cannabis growing up and into my early twenties, and when Massachusetts passed adult use, I could see the growth in front of me. My whole career had been working alongside leadership at small and mid-sized businesses, so when the chance came to build a cannabis division inside an already-established agency, I knew there was infrastructure behind me if I put in the work.

In my interview we agreed on the terms out loud: this is a test, and in six months I’m either looking for a new job or we’ve cracked into something real. That was the deal. That framing made it easier and there was no ambiguity about what success looked like. 600+ clients later, I think we found the growth opportunity.

With Cannabis Creative, what are some successful ways you’ve found ambitious clients in such a young, still-growing industry and developed the business simultaneously?

We built our own rooms. We created two industry networking events, the TeeHC Open (www.teehcopen.com) and Elevated Minds (www.elevatedmindsmj.com), and they’ve become one of our strongest business development assets.

The logic is simple. When you host an event with 300+ attendees, every single business in that room gets real value. Partners meeting the operators, suppliers, and partners they’ve been trying to reach. You’re not selling anything. You’re being useful at scale. And as the host, you meet everyone.

In an industry this young, trust moves faster than advertising does. Operators are still deciding who’s credible. Being the person who convenes the industry is a much better position than being the person emailing it.

Because the regulations are so strict, what are some of the most common advertising and marketing issues the cannabis brands the firm works with have to deal with constantly?

It comes down to content and angle. Most of the frustration I hear traces back to people not knowing where the line actually is on Meta and Google. The rules are learnable. What’s hard is what comes after: once you know what’s allowed, you still have to be creative inside it. That’s where most brands stall. They treat compliance as the end of the conversation instead of the starting conditions.

Get the blend right (real compliance discipline plus actual creative) and there’s a path. We’ve built it for hundreds of brands. The operators who win are the ones who stopped arguing with the rulebook and started working the edges of it.

From a policy standpoint, what would need to happen for Meta and Google to change their policies on cannabis advertisements on their platforms? Would it be an internal company policy that would need to change, or would it be something that American citizens would need to vote on?

Federal legalization. Not rescheduling, actual federal legalization.

I’ve had conversations with people at both companies who have teams researching this, and the answer is consistent: it’s business as usual until federal law changes. These are global platforms with enormous legal exposure. They’re not going to get ahead of the federal government on a Schedule I substance, and no amount of state-level progress changes that calculus.

It’s not really something citizens vote on directly either. It’s federal policy, and then the platforms follow.

And people should be realistic about what “open” would look like. Even after legalization, expect restrictions (age-gating, geo-targeting, creative limits, category exclusions). Look at how alcohol is advertised. That’s the ceiling. Cannabis marketing won’t become unregulated. It’ll become regulated in a way you can actually plan around, which is the part that matters.

How did serving on the Marketing and Advertising Committee of the National Cannabis Industry Association strengthen your understanding of the oftentimes confusing yet still restrictive rules surrounding cannabis advertising?

It’s a genuinely smart group of creative thinkers doing good work, and I learn something at basically every meeting. When you get people from different states, different business models, and different disciplines in one room, you find out fast how uneven this patchwork really is, something that’s standard practice in Massachusetts can be a violation in Illinois.

What I value most is the camaraderie. Everyone in that room understands we’re in this together, trying to elevate the industry as a whole and destigmatize the plant. Competitors share information because the bigger fight isn’t with each other. 

While serving on Rolling Stone’s Culture Council, what topics surrounding the cannabis industry did you usually cover? Why did you feel it was important to cover those subjects?

My bylines there covered the brand-building side of cannabis rather than the tactical side. I wrote about brand archetypes as a framework for building a distinct identity in an increasingly crowded market, about packaging regulations and why packaging design gets neglected when it’s often the only marketing asset a product carries into a customer’s hand, and about how to market a cannabis consumption lounge — which was an emerging category at the time with almost no established playbook. I also contributed to panels on online brand management, using technology to strengthen customer relationships, and digital marketing for e-commerce.

The reason those topics mattered is the audience. Rolling Stone isn’t a trade publication. When I write in Cannabis Business Times, I’m talking to operators who already believe in the industry. Rolling Stone reaches culture, music, food, and fashion readers — people who may still carry an outdated picture of what this business is.

So I wrote about cannabis the way you’d write about any serious consumer category: brand strategy, packaging design, retail experience, customer relationships. That framing is the argument. Treating cannabis as a legitimate business discipline in a mainstream cultural publication does more for destigmatization than any op-ed about destigmatization would.

What do you think the most widespread changes regarding advertising and marketing for cannabis brands will be in the next few years? How do you think a federal rescheduling and cannabis brands becoming federally registered will change the state-by-state regulations surrounding marketing for cannabis brands?

The biggest near-term change won’t come from advertising policy at all. It’ll come from tax code. If cannabis moves to Schedule III, 280E stops applying, and plant-touching operators can suddenly deduct ordinary business expenses – including marketing. That doesn’t unlock a single new channel, but it meaningfully changes how much money operators have to spend in the channels they already have. I expect marketing budgets to expand before ad platforms move an inch.

On the platforms: rescheduling won’t open Meta and Google. Schedule III is still a controlled substance. Those policies change at federal legalization, and even then the model will look like alcohol — age-gating, geo-restrictions, creative limits. Plan for regulated access, not open access.

On federal registration: this is the underrated one. Right now operators can’t get federal trademark protection for plant-touching goods, which makes real national brand building structurally impossible. Change that and you get the first genuine national cannabis brands — and a much more aggressive brand-investment environment, because IP finally becomes a defensible asset.

What federal movement will not do is flatten state rules. Alcohol is the template: federal oversight sits on top of fifty state regimes that all differ. Cannabis will be the same. Operators expecting one national rulebook are going to be disappointed.

Meanwhile, the shift that’s already happening: AI answer engines are becoming the front door. Consumers are asking ChatGPT and AI Overviews where to buy instead of searching and scrolling. In an industry where paid channels are restricted, owned assets — your site, your menu, your content, your first-party data — have always been the real competitive advantage. That’s about to matter more, not less.

Thank you for joining us, Dan! For more information on Cannabis Creative, please visit its website.