Pubdate: Mon, 04 Aug 2014
Source: USA Today (US)
Copyright: 2014 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/625HdBMl
Website: http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/index.htm
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/466
Author: Michael Wolff
Page: 1B

MARIJUANA, A MEDIA MIRACLE

The Legalization of Pot Brings Advertisers a New Opportunity

The coming legalization of marijuana, advocated last week by The New
York Times in perhaps the most noted editorial in its history, will
create a consumer product as sought-after as cigarettes (in their day)
and booze. Hence, legalized marijuana, among its other lucrative
effects - including closing gaps in state budgets with certain heavy
taxes - offers a gold mine for the media business.

Media have, in many ways, never recovered from the loss of cigarette
advertising, one of the all-time great revenue generators for
newspapers, magazines, television, radio and advertising agencies.
Marijuana could be as big a market as cigarettes and, as pot brands
try to establish and distinguish themselves, as prodigious an advertiser.

On Sunday, the Times ran a full-page ad for a company called Leafly,
which describes itself as "the world's largest information resource
about cannabis" and "the Yelp of cannabis."

Legalizing pot means, at least on some level, legalizing its
marketing, too. It would seem churlish and merely part of a continuing
governmental grudge to forbid pot manufactures from advertising - and
counterproductive once pot starts generating major tax revenue.
Cigarette advertising was curbed only after the health effects of
smoking became known. The legalization of marijuana acknowledges that
its benefits, or at least its pleasures, significantly outweigh its
negative effects. Why legalize it if you don't also acknowledge the
right to sell it? (Is that even constitutional?)

Certainly this will be part of the argument that the nascent marijuana
industry will make - an argument that, if it prevails, will transform
the media business, too. In fact, a good way to benefit from the
coming end of the prohibition might be to go long on media stocks.

Still, even if the federal government - trailing state governments
like those in Colorado and Washington - finally accepts the premise
that, in the words of The New York Times, pot's "casual use by adults
poses little or no risk for healthy people," there might still be a
public policy argument about age-appropriate marketing. Strait-laced
regulators and politicians trying to save face will surely take this
view.

But that presents another media opportunity. Print is suffering from a
lack of advertising interest and an aging readership. Restricting pot
advertising to print, and hence to adults (mature adults!), might not
only be a way to protect the young, but a compromise with positive
social implications as well.

Indeed, the legalization of marijuana, no matter how logical, timely
and even righteous, also involves a set of trade-offs. By accepting
the realities of science and consumer demand, we also might possibly
end up with a vaguer, dumbed-down nation.

Limiting marijuana advertising to print media performs something of a
public policy balancing act. The potential loss of intellectual focus
could coincide with a pot-financed renaissance in print media, a
resurgence of reading and even linear thought.

At the same time, of course, such targeted advertising might lead to a
growth industry in media just about pot.

There are, too, broader content implications and opportunities related
to pot. An ever-growing media problem is the difficulty of reaching
the rich market of young men who are distracted by video games and,
come to think of it, quite likely marijuana itself.

Vice Media, the video content company that specializes in these
otherwise inattentive young men, has recently been valued at $2
billion - so the opportunity is clearly vast. Seeing pot culture and
behavior more openly expressed by traditional media - in the way, for
instance, that it is expressed in so many YouTube videos (what else
explains them?) - might re-establish that lost connection between
mainstream media and the young.

In the 1950s and '60s, in addition to cigarettes being commonplace on
television, there was also a general acceptance - if not celebration -
of being drunk. Many variety shows featured hosts with ties askew,
holding an old-fashioned glass with clinking ice. The Rat Pack, or Rat
Pack style, dominated television for a decade and was mostly about
singing and clowning around when drunk. Arguably, the media have never
had such a connection to their audience as when they embraced and
acted out drunkenness.

Pot might suggest that sort of lifestyle camaraderie and shared
joke.

Pot, or pot style, could become part of what is now called content
marketing - using your content to create a symbiotic marketing
environment. The closer you can come to representing pot sensibility,
the closer you might be to a sweet-spot demographic and to attracting
the range of products that are willing to pay a premium to reach this
group of people, perhaps easier to appeal to and influence precisely
because they are high - a double marketing wallop. By this logic, most
media might become pot-partial.

One of the problems with contemporary media is not only the enormous
number of outlets competing for the attention of American consumers
but also the fact that, beyond sports, there is no central focus, no
common experience, that reliably brings us all together. We each
pursue our own varied interests, styles and politics, creating
enormous chaos and costs for marketers.

Pot, as the great leveler and unifying cultural principle, could
change that.
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MAP posted-by: Matt