After years of helping cannabis brands and retailers navigate advertising restrictions, fragmented data, and limited resources, Arrowsmith is introducing a new platform designed to unlock new marketing capabilities.
In an industry where regulations keep strict limits on how cannabis can be advertised, getting through to your target market has always been a uniquely difficult challenge. Being able to identify and effectively reach potential consumers based on their retail choices, purchase history, and individual preferences might sound impossible, and it has been - until now.
The Challenge of Turning Data into Action
Reaching the right audience is only part of the equation. With tighter budgets, growing competition, and ongoing regulatory restrictions, marketing teams are being asked to do more with less while proving the value of every dollar they spend. At the same time, the data needed to make informed decisions has never been more abundant or more fragmented.
Sales reports, data programs, distribution analytics, campaign results, and consumer insights all have value on their own. The challenge is that they often exist in separate systems, managed by different teams, and viewed through different lenses. As a result, brands can find themselves surrounded by information while still struggling to answer some of the most important questions: What's working? What's not? And where should we focus next?
For cannabis brands and retailers, such challenges have become a familiar part of the growth journey.
Building From Experience
Arrowsmith considers these challenges as more than just industry talking points. Founded in 2003, the company has spent over two decades operating at the intersection of marketing, technology, and data, including more than ten years focused on the cannabis industry. That experience recently earned industry recognition when founder Erik Fletcher was named AdCann's 2025 Marketer of the Year, reflecting the efforts of a team committed to innovation, creativity, and measurable results.
From left, Creative Director Nicole Larkin, President and Founder Erik Fletcher, and Director of Marketing Sarah Edgar.
Since the early days of legalization, Arrowsmith has been helping cannabis clients adopt many of the existing marketing technologies and strategies that have become commonplace in other industries. Yet one significant challenge remained.
While brands could improve reporting, strengthen retailer relationships, and make better use of data, advertising restrictions continued to limit their ability to connect with consumers in meaningful and measurable ways. For many marketers, reaching the right audience at the right time remained one of the industry's most persistent obstacles.
Increasingly, the team began asking a simple question: how do you make cannabis advertising both targeted and measurable without sacrificing compliance?
Rethinking Cannabis Advertising
Cannab Digital was built to answer that question.
By combining location intelligence, retail data, and consumer insights, the platform enables brands and retailers to deliver mobile advertising to consumers based on their real-world shopping behaviour at physical cannabis stores. Campaign targeting can be further refined to align with a brand's retail distribution footprint, consumer shopping habits, store visitation patterns, and demographic attributes including age and gender.
Cannab Digital enables compliant, age-gated programmatic advertising based on real-world shopping behaviour and consumer preferences.
Today, Cannab Digital maps more than 3,000 cannabis retailers across Canada and provides access to an addressable audience of over 3.5 million active cannabis consumers, creating new opportunities to connect digital advertising with real-world purchasing intent. Importantly, those capabilities have been developed specifically for the unique realities of the cannabis industry, including age-gating requirements and regulatory compliance considerations that are often overlooked by other advertising technologies.
"For years, cannabis marketers have had to work around limitations that most other industries simply don't face. One of our goals with Cannab Digital was to make sophisticated targeting, measurement, and optimization capabilities accessible to cannabis brands and retailers in a compliant and practical way."
- Erik Fletcher, Founder, Arrowsmith
The result is a highly targeted and measurable approach to advertising - one that helps brands spend smarter, drives engagement to retailers, and provides a clearer understanding of campaign performance to both parties. Just as importantly, it opens the door to marketing strategies that have become commonplace in other industries but have historically remained difficult to execute within cannabis.
Connecting the Dots
While programmatic advertising may be the flagship capability of Cannab Digital, it represents only part of a much larger product ecosystem.
Cannab Digital was designed to connect the channels, data sources, and activities that power modern cannabis sales and marketing.
The platform was built around a simple idea: the most successful marketing strategies rarely rely on a single channel.
Rather than replacing the people, partnerships, and tactics that already drive success in cannabis, Cannab Digital is designed to help connect them. Whether it's supporting in-field sales efforts, extending the impact of product sampling programs, measuring event activations, strengthening retailer relationships, or helping marketers better understand campaign performance, the goal remains the same: create a more cohesive and measurable ecosystem for everyone involved.
Beyond advertising, the platform already incorporates features such as customer relationship management (CRM) integration, attribution reporting, audience insights, retailer engagement tools, marketing automation, and B2C e-commerce capabilities. While these individual components are important, the bigger opportunity lies in using them together to make smarter, faster, and more informed decisions.
"The most exciting part isn't any single capability. It's the synchronistic ability to connect advertising, reporting, retailer engagement, automation, and customer intelligence into a single platform to help organizations make optimal decisions in this demanding industry."
- Sarah Edgar, Director of Marketing, Arrowsmith
Since launching earlier this year, initial campaigns have already produced impressive results, far exceeding category benchmarks and validating the team's belief that a more connected approach backed by data-driven strategy can improve both marketing performance and operational efficiency.
Arrowsmith continues to expand Cannab Digital with new features and partnerships, including out-of-home media, email marketing automation, and a direct-to-consumer delivery model designed to create even stronger connections between brands, retailers, and consumers.
Built By Entrepreneurs, For Entrepreneurs
While Cannab Digital is designed to support organizations of all sizes, Arrowsmith believes some of its most exciting potential lies in helping smaller and emerging brands compete more effectively. Many of the challenges the platform was built to solve - limited resources, fragmented data, and increasing pressure to demonstrate results - are often felt most acutely by founder-led businesses and lean teams.
Rather than requiring significant internal resources or specialized expertise, the platform is designed to meet organizations where they are today, scale alongside them as they grow. Whether a company is exploring advanced advertising, automation, customer relationship management, or simply looking for better visibility into its business, the goal is to make sophisticated marketing capabilities more accessible.
"Some of the most innovative brands in cannabis are also the ones operating with the fewest resources. We built Cannab Digital to help level the playing field and give those teams access to tools, insights, and opportunities that might otherwise feel out of reach."
- Erik Fletcher, Founder, Arrowsmith
That commitment extends beyond cannabis. Through their partnership with Business in the Streets, Arrowsmith continues to invest in the next generation of entrepreneurs, with a portion of campaign proceeds helping support programs that provide young business leaders with the skills, confidence, and networks needed to succeed.
What's Next for Cannabis Advertising?
In many ways, the launch of Cannab Digital reflects the broader evolution of cannabis marketing itself. As the industry matures, the conversation is shifting beyond awareness and reach toward measurement, efficiency, and long-term growth. For brands, retailers, and industry partners navigating that transition, platforms like Cannab Digital offer a promising glimpse of what's next.
Last Updated on August 12, 2026 by ADCANN
