How Brands Can Leverage Cannabis Awards for PR and Marketing—From the Best Cannabis PR Agency of 2024 and 2023

Winning an award isn’t just about recognition—it’s about what that recognition represents.

At Grasslands: A Journalism-Minded Agency®, we’re honored to be named Best PR Agency of the Year at The Emjays in both 2023 and 2024, alongside past wins like a Clio Cannabis Award, a MarCom Award and multiple ADCANN honors. But for us, it’s not just about collecting trophies. These wins reflect the work we do for our clients—helping them craft bold narratives, elevate their leadership and earn the kind of industry recognition that moves brands forward.

If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s worth the investment—time, money and effort—to apply for awards like The Emjays, Clio Cannabis Awards, Stevie® Awards, MarCom Awards and others, you’re not alone. Unlike the immediate impact of a press hit or a cover story, the ROI of an award win can feel a little more abstract. 

Make no mistake, however: cannabis industry awards aren’t just a vanity metric or something you purchase for a shelf at the office—they’re a strategic tool for building credibility, attracting media attention and strengthening key industry relationships.

In wellness CPG segments like cannabis and psychedelics that are still fighting for mainstream legitimacy, recognition matters. Awards aren’t just about who takes home the trophy—they are a powerful public relations asset that can be leveraged for validation, storytelling opportunities and social proof that a cannabis brand is making a real impact.

That’s exactly why, when Grasslands founder and CEO Ricardo Baca stepped on stage to accept our second consecutive Emjays award for Best PR Agency, he took a moment to remind the audience that we are, at our core, community builders. Ultimately, that’s what awards really represent—our shared values, ambitions and work that can raise the tide beneath our collective boats.

So, let’s talk about why cannabis brands should pursue industry awards as part of a broader PR and marketing strategy—and how, beyond the prestige, they contribute to something bigger: community.

Why Awards Matter for Cannabis Brands

Winning industry awards isn’t just an ego boost—it’s a powerful tool for brand building, legitimacy and leadership positioning. Awards are a natural extension of the primary goals of cannabis PR and marketing campaigns: to build brand awareness and reputation, and to cultivate a sense of expertise, authority and trust (EAT) with customers, clients, collaborators and allies. 

As we often say at Grasslands, PR for individual cannabis brands is PR for the cannabis industry and the plant as a whole. After decades of anti-cannabis propaganda and misinformation, acknowledgement that the work done by cannabis brands is both legitimate,important and should not be understated. 

Which Award Is Right for My Cannabis Brand?

Awards specific to and based within the cannabis industry include:

• The Emjays International Cannabis Awards
• The Clio Cannabis Awards
• ADCANN
• The Cannabis Business Awards
• The Cannabis Marketing Association Seven Awards
• International Cannabis Awards

These industry-specific awards are judged by insiders with a  deep understanding of the complexities of cannabis—much like how cannabis trade publications such as MJBizDaily, mg Magazine, High Times and Cannabis Business Times provide a level of insight and technical expertise that mainstream media outlets often don’t. 

From regulatory hurdles to market trends to the evolving landscape of consumer education, cannabis industry awards typically understand the unique challenges endemic to legal state markets, as well as the innovation that can blossom in response to those hurdles. These honors resonate most with industry stakeholders and help brands gain credibility among peers, investors and key decision-makers.

Mainstream awards can include international heavy hitters like: 

• MarCom Awards
• Stevie® Awards
• Clio Awards
• Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Anvil Awards
• US Customer Experience Awards
• Business Intelligence Group (BIG) Awards

They can also include awards for outstanding women in business, 40 under 40, best companies to work for, most admired CEO, most influential companies, C-suite and similar categories from organizations like metro business journals, publications like Ad Age or Crain’s New York Business and Wired.

These mainstream awards offer something equally powerful to their industry counterparts: broader legitimacy and recognition beyond the cannabis space. Winning a mainstream award signals to media, financial institutions and adjacent industries that your business isn’t just excelling in cannabis—it’s excelling in marketing, leadership or business strategy on a larger stage. 

When Leili Fatehi and Laura Monn Ginsburg accepted the Gold Stevie® Award for Startup of the Year in 2024, for example, it was an affirmation of the pair’s incredible advocacy work through Blunt Strategies. 

That Stevie® win was also a huge moment of recognition for women in the cannabis industry. Women have historically faced barriers to entry in cannabis and remain underrepresented in the 

This type of external validation helps push the industry forward and reinforces the idea that cannabis brands and leaders deserve the same recognition as those in more traditional sectors. As Ginsburg said at the Stevie® Awards ceremony, “This only adds to the credibility that we’ve been building for almost 10 years now.” 

How to Leverage an Award Win for Your Cannabis PR and Marketing Efforts:

An award might not be a brand’s most distinctive or important differentiator in and of itself. But it certainly represents what makes a brand stand out in a competitive sector, and is a key talking point that opens up other brand narratives to both consumers and the media.

For example, Grasslands was named Leading Cannabis Employer in 2021 and 2022 by mg Magazine, and a Top 20 Cannabis Company to Work For in 2021 by the workplace experts at Vangst. While many businesses might silo those awards as a recruitment tool, Ricardo Baca makes a point of  mentioning them in intro calls with prospective clients, too.

“One of the biggest complaints we get from incoming clients is that they had a lot of turnover with their points of contact at previous agencies,” explains Baca. “I bring up the number of awards we’ve won for best place to work because it tells our clients that our team is solid and that we do our best to retain our talent. We turned a recruitment narrative into a tool for business development by recognizing and addressing a common pain point for the brands we work with.”

From business development to securing partnerships to strengthening investor confidence, award-winning brands hold an advantage in an increasingly competitive landscape. In addition to building that sense of credibility and trust, cannabis awards can also increase brand recognition and market visibility.

An award win—or even a nomination—can also be amplified through:

1. Social Media

Share your award news—including nominations or voting period updates—on platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram and BlueSky. Engage with the award organization's posts, congratulate fellow winners and acknowledge those who contributed to your success. Updating the "Honors & Awards" section of your personal LinkedIn profile can also highlight your achievement. The award can also provide some excellent topics for thought leadership microblogs and other cannabis social media content. 

Take, for example, New Holland Group founder and CEO Jamie Person’s moving LinkedIn post about her recognition at the 2024 MJBizCon Empowering Women in Cannabis event. Although her trophy arrived in the mail broken, she was able to craft from that mishap a meaningful narrative that simultaneously celebrated her achievement while acknowledging the ongoing need for greater gender parity and an end to unjust incarceration of cannabis prisoners. 

2. Email Marketing

Award nominations, voting periods and wins can similarly be shared through marketing automation and e-mail marketing channels. Through e-blasts and newsletters, brands can share the win with their digital communities and use that credibility and good will to drive additional interest in strategic calls to action or content in the sales funnel. Incorporating the award logo into your team’s email signature is another way to share the award news and subtly reinforce the brand’s EAT across all internal and external comms. 

3. Website and Blog

Including awards on owned media channels like website copy and blogs is not only a tactic for enhancing EAT, it can also contribute to cannabis SEO strategy. Display the award logo prominently on your homepage or website footer and create a dedicated page to share news and updates, awards, testimonials or other credibility-boosting assets. Writing a blog post about the award is another way to draw a throughline between the business’ expertise and its value for future clients and customers. 

4. News Release

The right award win or nomination is an important moment in a brand’s public relations success story. But that success can be complemented with the right echo strategy. One example of how echo strategies can be executed is a news release designed to earn media coverage either directly about the award win or utilizing that credibility to garner interest from journalists about another brand narrative. 

An award can be a news story in and of itself—Wired, for example, has a whole tag on its site dedicated to award-related stories from Oscar and Emmy coverage to an article on the first Lego League Global Innovation Award winners. But even when it isn’t the direct hook, an award win can help busy journalists and editors see the mainstream value of a story they might otherwise turn down—that’s particularly important for small to midsize businesses or brands in niche markets like cannabis. 

5. Internal Communications

Cannabis is a challenging industry and that makes it even more important to share the win. Sharing the win is one of our core values at Grasslands, not only in how we approach public relations and client care, but also our own agency culture. Share the win with your own team after winning a cannabis award. From meeting agendas to internal memos to Slack channels to social media moments, good news about an award can energize employees, partners and key stakeholders, and remind them of the why behind the important work they do. That morale booster has unique value, especially in challenging moments of market uncertainty

6. Marketing Materials

Incorporate the award logo into your marketing collateral, including brochures, sales or investment decks and other print and digital assets. This visual cue reinforces your credibility and can influence potential clients' perceptions during the decision-making process. Don’t forget—if you’re prepping any of those marketing materials for a cannabis tradeshow or expo, you’ll want to work backwards from the event date to ensure you have enough time to include the award in any upcoming assets, booth designs and other materials. 

Our pre-conference marketing checklist can help you plan exactly when to add that award win to creative briefs for thirty party vendors like fabrication firms, graphic designers, copywriters and PR agencies. 

Awards are an important component of any integrating cannabis PR strategy, in addition to other tactics like newsjacking, proactive pitching, media training and thought leadership. They can also be incorporated into cannabis marketing efforts, particularly on owned media channels and mid-funnel assets like investor and product decks.