Groundworks Industries came to Stink Studios with the objective of creating brand awareness for the Portland-based cannabis brand Serra in Los Angeles. This brief resulted in an omni-channel brand campaign running across media such as print, OOH, cinema, digital and social, all in advance of Serra's 2020 store opening in Hollywood. While Serra had made a name for themselves as the “Purveyors of Quality Drugs” in Portland, they didn’t yet have the ability to lean on their product or retail experiences as a proof point in L.A. They needed a partner who could recontextualize their brand message for a highly competitive and saturated cannabis market.
Our opportunity was to leverage the multitude of reasons Angelenos would come to Serra: good experience, good design, and a good high, and to show that Serra’s dedication to quality is the reason behind the richness of their product. In doing so, we positioned Serra’s products as the impetus for truly feeling all the feelings.
For us, that meant driving B2B desire with OOH units within a five-mile radius of our top-tiered dispensaries (qualified by overlaying brand impact with perceived performance), as well as generating B2C brand and product awareness with street-level OOH, digital, and editorial placements in high-traffic areas for our target retail consumer demographic.
Our campaign revolved around the whimsical interpretations of six product feelings: Happiness, Relaxation, Focus, Energy, Creativity, and Relief. We partnered with Todd Davis at Davis Handmade to build out our concepts and with Luca Venter to capture these setups for print and digital.
Each setup required a heavy emphasis on pre-production planning, sketching, propping, and set building, all with the understanding that the creative process would need to be flexible and reactive during our two-day studio shoot.