Start from the constraint, not the template
Meta prohibits ads promoting the sale of THC products — anything above 0.3% THC or marketed as a THC product is covered — and permits CBD advertising only with prior written authorization and LegitScript certification, US-only, never targeted to people under 18. Google prohibits ads for substances that produce a recreational high, allowing only topical hemp-derived CBD at or below 0.3% THC, by application, in a short list of states.
Where compliant paid placement does exist — endemic platforms, cannabis publications, newsletters, some programmatic — California adds its own conditions: placement only where at least 71.6% of the audience is reasonably expected to be 21 or older, age affirmation before direct individualized marketing, the license number on advertising, and claims that are truthful and appropriately substantiated. Paid is not zero. It is narrow, endemic, and requires diligence per placement.
The budgeting consequence is straightforward: you cannot buy your way out of a weak brand or a weak retail program, so the money has to build assets that keep working.
The five lines that carry a cannabis budget
1. Production
This is usually the largest line and the most underestimated. Photography, video, design, and copy are not a one-time launch cost — they are the ongoing raw material for every channel you own. A brand producing content monthly needs a standing production capability, not an annual shoot that is stale by March.
Underfunding here is the most common budgeting error, because production feels like a cost while media feels like an investment. In a category with no media lever, production is the investment. Everything downstream — menu listings, retail assets, social, email — draws on it.
2. Retail support
The line most brands treat as sales' problem rather than marketing's. It covers sell sheets, shelf talkers, menu photography, budtender education materials and sessions, in-store activations, and the localized demand generation that sends customers to a specific door.
It deserves real money because it operates at the point of decision. A customer standing at the case with your jar and a competitor's is the highest-intent moment in the entire funnel, and it is decided by packaging, price, and whether the person behind the counter can explain you. That is why budtenders are the most undervalued influencers in cannabis — and why the education budget usually returns more per dollar than the social budget.
3. Owned channels
Website, email, SMS, and the data infrastructure underneath them. This is the only audience you keep when a platform decides otherwise, which makes it structural rather than optional.
The budget here is part build, part maintenance: a site that converts and stays current, list growth mechanics, sending platform costs, and the content to actually send. Brands routinely fund the build and forget the maintenance, which is how a good cannabis website becomes a stale one within a year.
4. Events and activations
Trade shows, launches, retailer dinners, pop-ups, sponsorships. In a relationship-driven, physical category these do commercial work that digital cannot, but they are also where budgets get destroyed by the costs nobody scoped: build, staffing, travel, product, capture, and the follow-up that converts the room into pipeline.
Budget events as total cost including the follow-up, not as a booth fee. An activation with no capture and no follow-up plan is an expensive party.
5. People and specialist execution
Internal owners, agency retainers, creator fees, and the specialists you cannot keep on staff. The honest version of this line acknowledges that an under-resourced internal team is the most common reason good marketing plans stall — approvals sit, samples do not ship, feedback takes three weeks.
How to actually distribute it
There is no universal split, and any percentage breakdown presented as an industry standard should be treated skeptically — the right allocation depends on your stage, your distribution footprint, and where your specific bottleneck is. Diagnose the bottleneck first.
- Low awareness, good product, few doors: weight production and retail support. You need assets and reasons for buyers to say yes.
- Good awareness, poor sell-through: weight retail support and budtender education. The problem is at the counter, not upstream.
- Strong sell-through, capped distribution: weight events, relationships, and trade-facing work. You are buying doors, not consumers.
- Platform-dependent audience: weight owned channels hard. You are buying insurance against an account action you cannot appeal.
Reassess quarterly. The bottleneck moves, and a budget built for last year's constraint funds the wrong thing all year.
Tradeoffs worth stating plainly
Spreading budget evenly across every line is the safest-looking and usually weakest choice. A brand that funds five channels at 60% of what each needs gets five underperforming channels. Concentration beats coverage when resources are tight, even though concentration is harder to defend in a board meeting.
There is also a genuine tension between brand and activation spend. Brand work compounds and is slow to measure; activation work is measurable and does not compound. Fund only activation and you rent demand forever. Fund only brand and you may run out of runway before it pays. Most operators need both, weighted toward whichever their business can survive being wrong about.
And the uncomfortable one: sometimes the answer is to spend less on marketing. If the product is inconsistent or the packaging is illegible at shelf distance, marketing spend accelerates a negative impression. Fix the fundamentals first — that is cheaper than marketing around them.
What most operators miss
Budgets are set by channel and consumed by production. A campaign approved as "social" quietly requires photography, design, copy, legal review, and retail versions of the same assets — and when those were not budgeted, they get skipped, which is why so much cannabis marketing ships at 70% of the quality it was designed at.
The second miss is not budgeting for measurement. Without the ability to see reorder frequency, branded search movement, and menu positioning, you cannot tell which line is working, so next year's budget is set by instinct and politics. The reporting infrastructure is a small line that makes every other line accountable, and the sales data you already have is where it starts.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of revenue should a cannabis brand spend on marketing?
Any single percentage offered as a category benchmark is worth questioning, because stage and distribution footprint change the answer enormously. A more useful test: is the budget sufficient to keep production, retail support, and owned channels all running at a quality you would defend? If one is starved, the others underperform regardless of the total.
Is paid advertising worth anything for cannabis brands?
Within endemic channels and compliant placements, yes — cannabis publications, newsletters, and some programmatic reach real buyers. It just cannot be the engine, and every placement carries diligence obligations on audience composition, age affirmation, and claim substantiation.
What is the first line to cut when budgets tighten?
Usually events, because their cost is concentrated and their return is slowest to prove. The lines to protect longest are retail support and owned channels, since those defend the revenue you already have.
The operating takeaway
Build the budget around the constraint, not the template. Fund production properly, treat retail support as marketing rather than sales overflow, protect the owned channels that survive a platform decision, and scope events at their true total cost.
High Rise has produced 250+ events and worked with 500+ brands and operators since 2012, and the budgets that work share one trait: they are built around the specific bottleneck in that business, not around what a marketing plan is supposed to look like.
Book a strategy call with High Rise to pressure-test your marketing plan.