cannabis pr

Getting your company in front of the media is critical for public exposure and brand recognition. Having a comprehensive communications plan that combines digital marketing and public relations efforts for your emerging cannabis or hemp company? That can put you ahead of the competition.

CMW Media CEO, Kyle Porter, joins Jeffrey Friedland of Cannabis and Hemp Insider to discuss the agency’s services for privately-held and publicly-traded emerging markets and cannabis, hemp, and CBD companies.

Kyle has also been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, Weedweek and more!

Visit our client case studies to learn more about our proven track record and see if CMW is the right partner for your business.

Video Transcript:

Jeffrey Friedland:

This is Jeffrey Friedland, and welcome to another edition of Cannabis and Hemp Insider Showcase videos. Today, I’m delighted to have with me Kyle Porter of CMW Media from California. Welcome Kyle.

Kyle Porter:

Great to be with you, Jeff. Thank you for having me.

Jeffrey Friedland:

Oh it’s great. Kyle, I’m having the pleasure of working with you on a number of companies, and I’m excited about what your company does and the relationship we have together. And we’re delighted that you’re joining us today from California. Kyle, your purpose in being here with us today is to let our viewers, who are management of privately held or publicly held companies in the cannabis, hemp and CBD industries, know what services your company, CMW Media, provides, and why those services are critical to a company’s success. Let’s jump right in Kyle. Can you tell us about the services that your company, CMW Media, provides to cannabis, hemp and CBD companies?

Kyle Porter:

I’d love to, and again, thank you for having me. And I was really excited to do this. We’ve been doing this, we’re going on our fifth year now. We’re a PR and marketing agency founded specifically in the cannabis space originally. We always say this was back when nobody knew what CBD was. And we went on a mission to try and change the stigma of CBD, bring it to the masses. Obviously five years later it’s become a mainstream topic. But we’ve really expanded beyond cannabis. We’re servicing what we’re calling emerging markets. And so that’s everything from biotechnologies, to psychedelics, to we did some crypto currency work. But at the end of the day, our job and our main service is to get you in the news. And there’s a lot of functions that go along with that. You’ve got to have the communication strategy. You’ve got to have the messaging down.

Kyle Porter:

And we took it a step beyond that and added digital marketing and creative, because what we found was these companies that were in these emerging markets would start fresh off their first raise or going into a publicly traded entity. And they had so many more communication needs. So website, social media, branding, deck creation, graphics, all the kit and caboodle that goes along with what I call corporate communication.

Kyle Porter:

So that’s what we do. But at the end of the day, the goal is to get eyeballs. We need to kind of what you do. You bring audiences to people, and that’s what we’ve been able to do through mainstream media, trade outlets. We’ve built relationships kind of across the globe, actually. We’ve done 23 now campaigns in 20 different countries, obviously a lot of work in Canada, Mexico, the US. We happen to be in sunny California because it’s beautiful to live here and it happened to be the mecca of cannabis. But really we only have a few clients in California. We’re all over the nation and world. But again, that main goal, that main service is to get you in the news and to get credibility builds through people talking about your company, your product, your vision, whether investments are consumer based.

Jeffrey Friedland:

Before we go on, Kyle, let’s talk a little bit more about the services you provide to privately held companies as compared to those for publicly held companies.

Kyle Porter:

So private companies, they’re at all different stages of development. I’ve worked with clients that have an incredible vision and who are bootstrapping their own company. And all they need to do is put together the message, put together a deck, and then go raise some money and get out there.

Kyle Porter:

On the flip side of that, away from the investments of the private is the consumer. And so in the cannabis industry, we’re very limited in what we can do from a traditional advertising standpoint. You can’t do social media. You can’t do traditional ads. And so what we found is even consumer-based cannabis and other emerging technology and companies can reach consumers through the media. So whether that’s Forbes to Vogue, consumers are still looking to new sources as credible and are making consumer behavior decisions. So depending on where you’re at in your private company, we kind of jumped in there. Again, I always say it’s corporate communications. So whether or not you’re publicly traded, you still have to communicate as a corporation and as a company. And how you do that and be strategic, concise, repetitive to where it kind of sticks in people’s minds. So that’s really where we help the private companies succeed, is either reach a B2B consumer or investment audience.

Jeffrey Friedland:

That’s super. I mean, it’s great. I’m sure we have a large number of management of both privately held, publicly held cannabis and hemp and CBD companies that watch our videos and come to our Cannabis and Hemp Insider website. I’m sure that many of them want to contact you to really get down to the nitty-gritty of the services that CMW Media can provide them. So we’ll provide, Kyle, your contact information so that they can contact you directly. Kyle, your firm, CMW Media, is positioned as a creative marketing and public relations firm. What do you see as the specific marketing and public relation needs of cannabis, hemp and CBD companies?

Kyle Porter:

So PR is interesting because a lot of people don’t really even know what PR means. There’s so many things. Essentially it’s thought leadership, is what we always say, and credibility. And so cannabis companies not only have to deal with the stigma. So what we can do through the PR is work with journalists to explain, well, tell me about your products. Tell me about the testing. Tell me about the safety, the efficacy. On the biotech side, there’s so much technical science that’s happening that we need to convey to investors, convey through layman’s terms that make sense. And we do that through journalists.

Kyle Porter:

And so I think that cannabis and hemp companies desperately need to get out there. And this is, I believe, going to be a really exciting year for the cannabis and hemp industries. And it’s going to further regulate cannabis. We could be looking at banking. We could be looking at full on decrem.

Kyle Porter:

But the point is that you’ve got to break through the noise. And over the past five years, the cannabis and hemp space has gotten crowded. And you’ve got a lot of players who had a dream, but didn’t really make it or were maybe blowing some smoke. And so for these legitimate companies who have a legitimate business plan to emerge and to make a space for themselves, they’re going to have to do it through the news media. We’re all sitting at home nowadays because of COVID.

Kyle Porter:

I wrote a piece here recently where I believe that digital content is more important than ever. What you’re doing is more important than ever because people are at home. We don’t have events. We don’t have trade shows. And so to get your name out there, to get your company in front of, again, an investor, in front of the consumer, a B2B player, if you’re trying to find a great distribution company in the THC space. There’s so many different avenues in which being in the media can reach audiences much broader than traditional advertising and things like that.

Kyle Porter:

So that’s where we really carved out our space. But along with that, and the reason we focused on digital marketing branding and the other things you mentioned, is because it has to be complimentary. If we worked up this fabulous messaging strategy, get you placed in Forbes or whatever it may be, but you have a crappy website or your social media isn’t functioning, or your deck is kind of a joke, that you lose your credibility altogether. We lose our credibility with our sources and our journalists. And so we want to put together that whole pretty picture. I always say our goal is to put together your company with a bow on it and hand to the world, and it’s got to look good doing it.

Jeffrey Friedland:

Look, Kyle, we’re both involved in the cannabis industry pretty significantly.

Kyle Porter:

I know.

Jeffrey Friedland:

And I think we agree on this. But what do you see as the biggest challenges facing cannabis, hemp and CBD companies from a marketing and public relations perspective?

Kyle Porter:

I was going to say right off the bat, I was like, bad actors was originally, as you were asking the question. I was going to say it’s so crowded and there’s so much kind of fluff out there that I think a huge challenge is to get through the weeds, if you will, to find the real legitimate players.

Kyle Porter:

But a challenge in the PR and marketing space is, again, very crowded environment, noisy environment, where when we started this five years ago, you could get a journalist’s attention by saying cannabis for kids. Well, nowadays they get a thousand CBD pitches a day. They’ve heard of every delivery mechanism. They’ve heard of all these things. And so you’ve really got to be unique.

Kyle Porter:

And so I think a challenge in your marketing, either to consumers or through the media or whatnot, is to differentiate yourself. What’s going to make you that kind of unicorn of the space? Is it an innovative product? Is it an innovative cannabinoid? Are you doing unique formulations? And so that’s, I think, a challenge that’s, literally people come to us with, “Here’s my business plan. Figure it out.” And I have to sit there and go, what are the differentiators? What if we tweak that and put out the message of this new product, or why we’re innovators, or really talk about that forward thinking mentality.

Jeffrey Friedland:

That’s really fascinating. And, absolutely, I’m totally in agreement with you on that. Kyle, is there a last takeaway you’d like to leave our viewers with today?

Kyle Porter:

I already kind of said it. Maybe I’m a little optimistic but I feel like we’re back in the momentum of 2017, ’18 that we all felt, if you’ve been in the space long enough. Not to mention the regulatory and legal changes that might happen in the hemp and cannabis space over the next year. We have an opportunity. We have an opportunity to legitimize and stabilize our market. We have an opportunity to introduce new markets, whether nationwide, internationally. And so I think a takeaway, if I could give any advice that I’ve learned through the years is do it through an authentic voice. Excuse me. You can’t just come out trying to get rich. And I think that the industry saw that and we rejected it. And now that we’re headed to more stabilized good business, good business practices, treating consumers well, having good products, not just faking it.

Kyle Porter:

That would be my takeaway is as I look to the future of working in this industry, I’m a little bit more selective of who I work with these days, because I’ve been fluffed and I’ve been sold the dream, and the dream was, as we’ve all seen, not always reality. And so my takeaway is work with partners. We’ve got to work together as an industry because this isn’t happen overnight for one rich guy to explode and call it a day. That we’ve got to work together as an industry to legitimize, to stabilize, to regulate, to create international commerce, to create interstate commerce. But we have to do that together. And so don’t try to make the quick buck. Do this for the long run, and I think we’ll all win.

Jeffrey Friedland:

I think that’s right. I mean, cannabis, hemp and CBD, I’ve been in since 2013 [crosstalk 00:11:57] here in Colorado. So I beat you by a few years. But I saw it. It really was the Wild West here in Colorado, because we were the first jurisdiction in the world to allow licensed adult use or recreational cannabis. And in those days we were owners of two retail stores and a grow facility. So if you think there were a lot of promotional or people looking for a fast buck today, you should have been around then, Kyle. That’s all I can say. Anyway, Kyle, it’s great to have you with us today. We’re going to provide your contact information.

Kyle Porter:

I appreciate it.

Jeffrey Friedland:

We know that many of our viewers, again, who are management of privately held, publicly held companies are going to want to reach out to you, discuss their own situation, their current operations plans for the future, and find out what your firm can do for them.

Kyle Porter:

I appreciate it. And I look forward to it, and if anything, I’m a consultant and I love business. And so I love to just talk to people here about their business and again, you’re to do good work and do good for the industry and hopefully make a living doing it

Jeffrey Friedland:

Well, it’s going to be interesting with everything going on in Washington and hopefully coming out of this COVID situation, which, I don’t know, you’re coming out of in Southern California.

Kyle Porter:

We’re in locks down right now.

Jeffrey Friedland:

Anyway, Kyle, thanks for being with us here today. I’m looking forward to having you back, both about cannabis, hemp and CBD space, but also, on some of our sister sites about services that your firm also provides to other companies and other industries, especially biotech and pharma.

Kyle Porter:

It’s a huge area.

Jeffrey Friedland:

To you, our viewers, thanks for joining us today here at Cannabis and Hemp Insider. Until next time, this is Jeffrey Friedland. Goodbye.

Kyle Porter:

Thanks.