Cannabis companies are using the metaverse to set up shops, promote their core product, and sell real-world merchandise and nonfungible tokens.
Major brands such as Miller Lite, Wendy’s, Estée Lauder, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have also experimented with using digital worlds for marketing, but cannabis marketers think the metaverse could offer some advantages of particular interest to them.
To the degree that the metaverse operates on the principles of Web3, in which decentralization replaces corporate control over the web, cannabis marketers might be able to talk up their products more freely than they can on platforms such as Facebook, said Lisa Buffo, founder, and chief executive of the Cannabis Marketing Association.
“It is a wide-open space in Web3…regulators haven’t wrapped their head around it yet,” Ms. Buffo said.
About a thousand people visit the store a day, said Brandon Howard, chief executive of Higher Life.
Saucey’s floor includes another cash register, which again leads to a website where visitors can shop, in this case for non-cannabis merchandise such as grinders.
Saucey hasn’t sold many items to visitors who click its cash register, said Alex Todd, co-founder of the company. But Saucey expects that to change when more people join the metaverse, he said.
The metaverse is perhaps within five years of actually being able to sell cannabis, Mr. Todd said, predicting U.S. federal regulations prohibiting the sale of the product could ease in that time frame.
Meanwhile, NFTs can help Saucey spread awareness of the brand, particularly as more people join the metaverse and seek clothes and accessories for their avatars, he said.
“It is going to be a great tool for the cannabis space,” he said.
Cannabis brand Kandy Girl, which is known for selling a THC-infused gummy that can ship to all 50 states, acquired land in Decentraland in December to promote the company and sell NFTs. It has sold and given away virtual wearables with accompanying NFTs, including wings that look like marijuana leaves. Its NFT sales in Decentraland have totaled about $30,000 so far, Kandy Girl said.
But there aren’t enough users currently to take the effort to the next level, said Ben Boyce, chief marketing officer at Kandy Girl, which is owned by Boyce Capital LLC.
“When there are a million people logged into a metaverse at any given time, that’s when it is going to make sense to staff [a virtual] dispensary with a real live human being,” Mr. Boyce said.
For now, cannabis brands are enjoying the relative freedom of the metaverse, where they can use tactics that are often prohibited on dominant digital advertising platforms such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
Meta’s community standards ban content, whether paid advertising or unpaid organic content, “that attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate or gift or asks for marijuana.” Its advertising policies say companies “must not promote the sale or use of illicit or recreational drugs.”
