I’m ProjCan: Turning Local Culture Into a 100-Person Brand Advocacy System

Executive Summary

A community program designed to move at the speed of culture

Project Cannabis had loyal customers, culturally connected employees, multiple dispensaries, and brands worth talking about. The commercial opportunity was to organize that existing enthusiasm into a system that could create content, strengthen community, and increase retail and product visibility.

"I’m ProjCan" was conceptualized after recognizing the need to build greater channel velocity for Project Cannabis stores and the brands they carried. I served as marketing director, creative director, campaign strategist, and executive producer, leading a hybrid team of four internal contributors and four external specialists across design, motion, photography, social media, and field production.

We also consulted with Remarkable, an external agency partner, on UGC best practices and in-field production. The result was a fully deployed, 100-member advocacy program made up of 50 employees and 50 customers, supported by recruitment, individual identities, original content, personal offers, referral mechanics, bilingual materials, physical kits, digital amplification, and earned in-person experiences.

The Business Situation

A regulated market made credible word of mouth more valuable

Project Cannabis operated in a category where conventional digital advertising was restricted, social publishing could be throttled, and much of the market communicated through repetitive promotions. Discounting could generate short-term traffic, but it did little to build a durable relationship or distinguish one retailer from another.

At the same time, the dispensaries already served a diverse Los Angeles customer base with its own tastes, creative lives, communities, and cultural influence. Employees and regular customers were not an audience abstraction. They were people with real relationships to the stores and credible reasons to participate.

The starting insight was simple: people believe people more than they believe brands. The strategic challenge was to give those relationships enough structure to become a repeatable commercial asset without making them feel manufactured.

The Operator Question

How can a retailer become locally meaningful—and turn real relationships into measurable advocacy?

The program had to create value across several connected needs:

• Make the Project Cannabis dispensaries and their brand portfolio feel locally and culturally relevant.
• Give employees and loyal customers a recognizable role inside the brand.
• Create an ongoing supply of authentic, permissioned lifestyle content.
• Connect advocacy to store visits, personal offers, referrals, and product discovery.
• Work across retail, social media, email, landing pages, events, and physical materials.
• Remain manageable, compliant, measurable, and on budget.

Meet People Where They Culture

Cultural relevance was the strategy—not a layer of styling

I’m ProjCan became one of my clearest expressions of “Meet People Where They Culture.” My most important responsibility was maintaining that cultural relevance while translating it into an organized and financially responsible marketing program.

The campaign did not ask participants to perform a generic cannabis lifestyle. It recognized them as musicians, artists, creators, employees, regulars, friends, and community members. The numbered portrait system gave each person visibility inside a larger collective while preserving an individual point of view.

Diversity and representation were treated as outcomes of working with the actual community—not as a casting tactic added after the strategy was complete.

The Strategy

Replace a top-down ad program with a bottom-up participation system

Instead of paying a small number of distant influencers to borrow attention, we organized a network of 100 official members with genuine relationships to Project Cannabis: 50 employees and 50 of the company’s most loyal customers. Customers were identified and invited by the team or could apply and self-enroll in the program.

Membership came with a clear participation requirement. Each member agreed to publish a Story, post, or Reel twice per week and tag both a favorite participating brand and their Project Cannabis shop. This created a reliable stream of distributed community content while helping the message travel through personal accounts in a category where brand-owned cannabis content was frequently restricted or throttled.

The creative idea and commercial mechanics were designed together. A distinct identity made membership recognizable. Numbered profiles and personal content made participation visible. Unique offers and referral codes made advocacy actionable. Events and physical kits made the relationship tangible. Social, email, landing pages, and retail touchpoints gave the content somewhere to travel.

Recruitment & Membership

“Are you ready to go pro?” made advocacy feel earned

The recruitment language framed participation as a step into a selective community rather than another loyalty sign-up. QR-enabled postcards connected physical retail encounters to the application process, while English and Spanish materials made the invitation more useful across the local customer base.

Official members entered a structured value exchange. They received a recognizable member identity, personalized content, exclusive access, shareable offers, referral tools, merchandise, experiences, and public recognition. In return, members maintained the twice-weekly publishing cadence and tagged a favorite brand and Project Cannabis location. Project Cannabis received original content, credible endorsements, stronger word of mouth, customer referrals, and deeper relationships with the people already influencing its stores.

The Creative System

One identity with enough room for 100 different people

The campaign needed to feel consistent without flattening its participants. We developed a graphic system built around a geometric campaign mark, dark tactile surfaces, strong typography, color washes, numbered profiles, lifestyle photography, and phrases drawn from contemporary conversation.

Static advertising, individual portraits, motion graphics, social posts, recruitment materials, member cards, landing pages, offers, event content, and retail touchpoints could all belong to the same system. The framework was controlled enough to build recognition and flexible enough to keep producing fresh work.

Remarkable advised on UGC best practices and supported in-field production. Our combined internal and external team handled strategy, direction, motion, design, photography, social publishing, participant coordination, content capture, and amplification.

Community Activation

The program became real when the community met in person

The strongest-performing members were invited to the I’m ProjCan Member Appreciation Day and BBQ at Project Cannabis headquarters. The gathering rewarded consistent participation while giving members and the team a chance to meet in person and experience the community beyond their social feeds.

Selected attendees received the campaign gift-box reveal and took part in a dedicated content shoot. The event generated photography, video, reactions, and organic sharing while giving the marketing team a deeper understanding of the people helping the program grow.

A few members also won rare access to tour Project Cannabis’s 90,000-square-foot Los Angeles cultivation center—a deliberately “Wonka-like” experience that could not be purchased and was available only through active I’m ProjCan participation. Together, the BBQ, gift boxes, content capture, and cultivation visit turned performance into recognition and membership into something people could genuinely experience.

The Commercial System

Connect cultural participation to retail and brand velocity

The program was designed to move beyond awareness. Personalized landing pages, unique offers, referral codes, shareable discounts, product recommendations, social content, email, retail touchpoints, and participant networks created multiple paths back to Project Cannabis stores and the brands available inside them.

This mattered because Project Cannabis operated as both a retailer and a platform for product brands. When champions shared credible experiences, the content could strengthen the store relationship while also introducing products, offers, and reasons to return.

Rather than depending on one large influencer or one campaign burst, the distributed model created a network effect: more people, more perspectives, more local relevance, and more opportunities for content and conversation to travel.

Transferable Commercial Principle

Give customer enthusiasm identity, structure, and somewhere useful to go

Most brands already have potential advocates: loyal customers, knowledgeable employees, creative regulars, local partners, and people who repeatedly recommend the business. Enthusiasm alone, however, is difficult to coordinate or measure.

A champion program makes that enthusiasm more commercially valuable by creating a fair value exchange. Participants receive belonging, recognition, access, tools, experiences, and shareable benefits. The business receives credible stories, reusable content, referrals, cultural intelligence, and stronger community relationships.

This principle transfers beyond cannabis. It can support hospitality groups, apparel brands, entertainment properties, food and beverage companies, sports organizations, neighborhood retailers, and multi-location operators that need to feel locally meaningful rather than generically present.