For this episode, we talk with Angry Butterfly (independent agency, Toronto)'s Executive Creative Directors Bernice Lo and Adam Notzl-Keyser (+ Associate CD Chenice Piercy) and unpack the award-recognized “Next to Stoked” campaign for Stok'd Cannabis, a four-store Ontario retailer boxed in by Canada’s stringent cannabis ad rules.
In a market where brands can’t show effects, taste, celebrities, many lifestyle cues—and, critically, can’t meaningfully point to store locations—the team reframed the brief: advertise the neighbours.
By producing cheeky spots for adjacent small businesses (nail salons, bookstores, electricians) that contained winking double-entendres and precise “right beside Stoked Cannabis” location nods, they ran “legal-ish” creative across channels that normally reject cannabis ads.
The execution mixed high-quality Google pre-roll, geo-targeted to ~5 km around each store, with OOH that literally mapped “you are here → you should be here,” and social placements that passed Meta/TikTok filters by promoting the neighbour, not the dispensary.
With in-house media steering, the work stayed capital-efficient and hyper-local while feeling culturally big. Within 30 days, sales surged and PR took off: national OOH partners approved the work, industry press debated the tactic, and the brand’s challenger persona (“feisty, clever, a little ballsy”) crystallized—earning recognition at Cannes Lions and sparking wider conversation about compliant growth in regulated categories.
For global advertisers and cannabis CMOs, the episode delivers a playbook: constraints can be creative advantages; adjacency (physical and conceptual) is a potent signal; geo precision + platform-compliant messaging beats blunt force spend; and indie-agency agility can move faster than holding-company bureaucracy.
The takeaway travels: any regulated or retail-footfall business can adapt this model to convert neighbourhood intent into store traffic—without breaking the rules.
