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Eaze and Vistar Media Turn Cannabis Can'ts into Cans with Programmatic DOOH

November 6, 2023 | 4 min read

Eaze, a leading cannabis software platform and marketplace, is on a mission to enhance safe access to legal cannabis, educate consumers about cannabis as a tool for wellness, and drive smart cannabis policies

Aiming to drive awareness, consideration and intent for its cannabis delivery services, Eaze enlisted Vistar Media to activate a legally-compliant and innovative digital out-of-home campaign across Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.

Through Vistar’s patented technology platform, Eaze is taking a programmatic-first approach — tapping into custom POI sets and time-based activation — to activate digital out-of-home media and get in-market consumers excited about cannabis delivery.

Strategy

Eaze’s initial work with Vistar spanned two initiatives, incorporating DOOH across both its “Summer Celebration” and “End of Q3” campaigns. In both cases, Eaze leveraged programmatic digital out-of-home to complement the other channels in its media mix, which included traditional out-of-home, mobile, digital, audio, and digital partnerships. To overcome a core marketing challenge of reaching consumers and predicting their behaviors, Eaze tapped into Vistar Media’s programmatic DOOH platform to leverage a robust mix of digital formats that enhanced their ability to target essential businesses and connect with consumers in the physical world.

In conjunction with Eaze’s legal team as well as our media owner partners, Vistar was able to identify the legal cannabis compliant digital out-of-home venues available — eliminating all locations that were within 1,000 feet of schools, rehabilitation centers and other conflicting points of interest. By crafting a custom POI list that matched these compliant areas and venue locations, Vistar’s advanced time- and location-based technology platform programmatically activated Eaze’s advertising across select venue types, utilizing sophisticated day-parting capabilities to trigger ads solely during the company’s operating delivery hours of 8AM-10PM PT.

Making waves across both the cannabis and out-of-home industries, two of Vistar’s leading media owner partners, Volta and Firefly, decided to accept cannabis advertising on their screens for the first time ever. This was especially innovative for Firefly, as the screens are located on top of moving vehicles which has in the past prevented any “sensitive category” advertisers (such as alcohol or cannabis) from taking advantage of this inventory because of the difficulty of remaining compliant with restrictions. Vistar’s advanced technology and ad server enabled Eaze to trigger ads only when each vehicle was driving within certain approved neighborhoods and streets. When a vehicle returned to an area outside of our custom POI location list, an ad would not be served. This is a first-of-its-kind for the industry at large and DSP technology alike.

“Vistar’s innovative platform provided additional coverage to effectively target consumers compliantly, which contributed to the team’s successful summer celebration and Labor Day campaigns.”

~Sheena Shiravi, VP of Marketing

Results

This campaign exemplifies the powerful combination of OOH media with programmatic capabilities. Vistar’s DSP made it simple for Eaze to streamline, plan and optimize this campaign, with the automation that programmatic technology brings. Robust platform capabilities like automatic dayparting and POI targeting, without a minimum spend or flight length, enabled Eaze to activate its very specific campaign parameters without any manual labor or heavy lifting. In order to benefit from holistic targeting and measurement capabilities, Eaze was able to launch one campaign broken down into separate flights — focusing separately on brand awareness, COVID-19 messaging, and summer promotions — enabling the brand to activate fresh messaging that aligns with its core goals and real-world changing circumstances.

To evaluate the success of the campaign, Eaze and Vistar Media are conducting a Market Pulse Brand Study, which will measure metrics such as awareness, consideration, intent and more — providing the brand with an understanding of their overall brand health in each of the markets the campaign is running in. Eaze will receive initial results in the next few weeks, which will allow the team to optimize their campaign in real-time, making adjustments towards top-performing tactics to maximize campaign success.

Eaze leads the pack as an early adopter in bringing the value of programmatic technology to both the cannabis and out-of-home industries — all while navigating the challenging and varying state-by-state advertising rules in place for the vertical.

Learn more here!