The Story Before the Thesis
If you’ve never come across 93 Boyz’ The Gas Station series on YouTube, it’s worth spending a few minutes watching before reading any further.
A customer walks into what appears to be an ordinary neighbourhood gas station looking for cannabis. What begins as a straightforward interaction slowly unravels into a conversation filled with deadpan humour, exaggerated personalities, and the kind of exchanges that somehow feel both ridiculous and oddly believable. The employees bounce off one another effortlessly, customers drift in with their own quirks, and before long the gas station starts to feel less like a retail store and more like the setting of a sitcom.
Then the episode ends and you find yourself clicking on the next one.
On the surface, every episode revolves around a customer interaction, but beneath the humour something else is quietly happening. The conversations naturally introduce different products, compare strains, poke fun at common customer questions, and reveal pieces of the company’s personality, mission, and values without ever stopping to deliver what feels like a sales pitch. Information isn’t presented as a commercial break. It’s simply woven into the conversation. The products don’t interrupt the story, they belong in it.
Somewhere along the way, you stop watching because it’s a cannabis company and start watching because you enjoy spending time with the people behind the counter. You begin recognizing familiar faces, anticipating the running jokes, and wondering what absurd situation is going to walk through the door next.
I think that’s what makes The Gas Station so compelling.
The series is produced by a cannabis company, yet it rarely feels like traditional cannabis marketing. It’s freely available on YouTube, asks nothing of its audience, and simply trusts that if people enjoy spending time in the world it has created, they’ll come back on their own.
And they do.
Where the Relationship Ends
Watching The Gas Station made me realize I wasn’t just watching a clever YouTube series. I was watching a cannabis company continue a relationship that, at least in Canada, often ends the moment a customer leaves the store.
That isn’t because Canadian cannabis brands don’t want to build deeper relationships with consumers. In many ways, we’ve never really been given the opportunity.
With some of the strictest advertising regulations in the world, licensed producers have had to rely heavily on retailers to become the face of their brands. Realistically, we’ve had little choice. Retail stores are where conversations happen, where products are discovered, and where trust is built. They’re where brands have been allowed to exist.
As a result, we’ve become incredibly good at building relationships with retailers. We create merchandising displays, educate budtenders, develop product sheets, sponsor retailer events, and invest countless hours helping the people behind the counter understand who we are and what makes our products different. We spend countless hours painting vivid pictures of our brands so someone else can share that story with the customer standing across from them.
It’s not a flaw in the system. It’s simply the reality of operating in one of the most tightly regulated consumer industries in the country.
Because of that, much of our marketing has evolved around moments.
We pour our energy into pop-ups, community events, retailer activations, industry conferences, and social media campaigns, all in the hope of creating meaningful connections. And they work. Anyone who’s spent time at a cannabis festival or industry event knows the energy is contagious. People line up to meet growers, discover new products, share stories, and connect over a plant that has always represented more than what comes inside the package.
That’s because cannabis has never existed in isolation. Long before legalization, it spread through music, art, films, friendships, and the communities that formed around it. It became part of road trips, campfires, concerts, creative projects, late-night conversations, and quiet evenings at home. Cannabis has always been rooted in culture. The product has simply been one expression of it.
The challenge is that most of the experiences we create have an expiration date.
The festival ends. The booth gets packed away. The social media campaign loses momentum or disappears altogether. Before long, we’ve shifted our attention to the next launch, the next activation, or the next opportunity to get people through the door.
Our campaigns eventually come to an end.
The customer’s experience is only just beginning.
That’s when they take the product home and that’s when cannabis is actually experienced.
Not at the checkout counter, but on the couch after a long day. Around a campfire with friends. During movie night. On an evening walk. While making music, creating art, or simply slowing down for a few hours. Those are the moments people remember. Those are the moments that give cannabis meaning beyond the transaction.
Yet they’re also the moments where most brands quietly disappear.
That’s what made 93 Boyz stand out to me.
The Gas Station doesn’t end the relationship once the purchase is made. It gives people another reason to spend time with the brand after they’ve gone home. Whether they’ve bought a product that week becomes almost irrelevant. They come back because they enjoy the humour, recognize the characters, and feel like they’re stepping back into a place that’s become familiar.
The relationship continues, even when the transaction doesn’t.
The Opportunity Between Purchases
The more I thought about it, the more I realized this isn’t really a story about one YouTube series.
It’s about a gap that I don’t think the Canadian cannabis industry has fully explored.
We’ve accepted that the relationship between a brand and a customer largely exists inside the retail environment. That’s where products are discovered, questions are answered, recommendations are made, and purchasing decisions happen. Once the transaction is over, we’ve had very few ways to continue that relationship without crossing the line into prohibited advertising.
Maybe that’s why The Gas Station caught my attention.
It doesn’t ask people to come back because they need cannabis, it gives them a reason to come back because they enjoy spending time there.
I think there’s an opportunity hidden in that distinction.
Not because every cannabis company should start producing comedy sketches or launching a YouTube series, but because it challenges us to think differently about what we’re actually building.
For years we’ve measured success by getting people through the door, onto a website, or to a point of purchase. But what if we also measured success by something much simpler?
Would someone choose to spend time with our brand if we weren’t asking them to buy anything?
That’s a very different question.
When I talk about entertainment, I’m using the term broadly. It could be a documentary following a harvest, a podcast exploring cannabis culture, a short film, a cooking series, collaborations with artists or musicians, behind-the-scenes footage from a cultivation facility, local travel stories, community spotlights, educational content that people genuinely enjoy, or even a fictional world like The Gas Station.
The format isn’t really what matters.
What matters is creating something that earns a place in people’s lives because it offers them something of value, whether that’s a laugh, a story, a new perspective, or simply a place they enjoy returning to.
Painting the Colours Behind a Brand
I also don’t think this is really about content, it’s about revealing the parts of our brands that rarely get the chance to be seen.
We’ve become incredibly good at explaining what we sell. We talk about genetics, terpene profiles, cultivation methods, extraction techniques, THC percentages, and product innovation. Those conversations are important, but they only tell part of the story.
They don’t tell people who we are.
Every cannabis company has a personality. Every cultivation team has stories that shaped the way they grow. Every founder has a reason they entered this industry. Every retailer has memorable customer interactions. Every community has its own humour, traditions, local characters, and shared experiences.
Those are often the things that make a brand memorable.
Yet they’re also the things we share the least because so much of our communication has been shaped by regulation, compliance, and the need to market through retailers.
Media gives us the opportunity to paint with a much broader palette.
It allows brands to express their values without listing them on a website, reveal their personality without trying to define it in a mission statement, and build familiarity through shared experiences instead of repeated promotions. Rather than telling people what makes your company different, you invite them to experience it for themselves.
To me, that’s what branding has always been about.
Not finding another way to sell a product, but giving people enough of yourself that they begin to understand the people behind the product.
Because products evolve. Packaging changes. New genetics arrive every season.
The people don’t.
Their stories don’t.
Their communities don’t.
Those are the colours behind a brand and they’re what people connect with.
In an industry where products are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate, those human connections may become one of the most meaningful points of difference we have.
Last Updated on July 30, 2026 by ADCANN
