Creator Jaz Melody doesn’t have her own line of cannabis-infused beverages. But if you’ve seen an ad for beverage brand Cann on your TikTok feed, you might think otherwise.
In the past several months, Melody has become essentially the face of Cann on TikTok, where she tells viewers about the effects of its beverages, where to buy them, and their effects as an alcohol alternative in paid and organic posts. Each month, she posts between 10 and 15 TikToks promoting the beverage.
Cann was founded by Jake Bullock and Luke Anderson in 2018, who “built the brand on the back of Instagram,” Bullock told us, and as TikTok and Reels started gaining traction in recent years, he said they decided to get in on the trend.
“That’s driven so much of this shift in our focus to shorter-form video content away from some of the beautifully, painstakingly designed assets that we would have had [on Instagram] in the past,” he said. “Working with Jaz was really an entry into that.”
Melody is one of only a few creators the brand has worked with in an official capacity, and since Cann started working with her in the spring, it’s gained 9,000 new customers and clocked more than 70,000 hours in watch time on the platform, according to the company. Now, Cann has amassed nearly 28,000 TikTok followers, and Bullock said his team is looking at how to grow its creator base further.
Cann-do attitude
Prior to its partnership with Melody, who has 184,000 TikTok followers and posts primarily pop-culture content, Cann’s TikTok strategy consisted of more meme-like content, sometimes with other creators. To find the face of its new front-facing-video content strategy, Bullock said his team vetted hundreds of creators before landing on Melody. Her style, he said, “encapsulated the [Cann] ethos and brand persona” while also feeling “culturally relevant” to today’s trends.
“We're delivering a product that people put inside of their bodies, [so] it often scares people,” he said. “‘How high will I get while drinking these drinks?’ is a common question that we get. We want to instill a sense of trust and safety and education, and I think she delivers that in a really clear, fun way.”
Bullock said the team has started cross-posting some of Melody’s content onto Instagram, but it continues to use that platform primarily for more polished, static images. When a post performs well on TikTok, the brand puts ad spend behind it—but only in states where cannabis is legal, he said.
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While cannabis-related ad restrictions have eased up on some platforms in recent years, Bullock said the brand still runs into challenges when it comes to advertising its hemp products, which are legal on the federal level. “You’re often accidentally getting shut down or shadow-banned…because of something that is not actually understood by the platforms very well,” he said. Bullock said X is the clearest on its advertising rules, and said he views Instagram as being the “hardest to understand” when it comes to guidance on what is or isn’t allowed on the platform. Selling to its 100,000 followers there, he said, is a no-go.
“We’re always very careful on [Instagram] because we have a really valuable, engaged community that we don’t want to put at risk,” he said. “It’s really hard to take advantage of or monetize that asset because of the rules.”
Still, there are workarounds. One way is by calling cannabis use “gardening” on TikTok, a trend that aims to avoid potential platform censorship. When working with creators like Melody, he said the brand shares a “big book of brand lingo” based on learned experience.
While Bullock and Anderson have experimented with traditionally shot-and-produced promotional and educational videos on the brand, Bullock said they’re very much of the “old-school world” when it comes to front-facing video.
“I think so much more of what’s working in the world today is shot on iPhone, it’s organic, it feels like it was done off the cuff, even though maybe it wasn’t,” he said. “That’s a harder thing for us to do.”
Based on the success of their videos with Melody to date, Bullock said Cann is looking to expand its roster and go beyond the one-face approach. In the meantime, he said, he doesn’t mind if people might think the brand is Melody’s.
“I read those comments as being a really good sign of selecting somebody that feels authentic and endemic to Cann the brand,” Bullock said. “Overall, I think that’s good.”