Are You in Love with that Mary Jane? An Interview with Ted Chung of MERRY JANE

Are You in Love with that Mary Jane? An Interview with Ted Chung of Merry Jane
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I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, where thousands of investors, leaders and founders in an array of technology industries congregated under one roof. In that time serial entrepreneur Ted Chung, the Founder and CEO of Stampede Management and MERRY JANE took some time out of his hectic schedule to chat with me about the MERRY JANE company, which he co-founded with hip hop legend Snoop Dogg, whom is not only his business partner but client under his management company. Take a peek inside the mind of Ted Chung below and how he is planning to revolutionize an untapped industry with the MERRY JANE company.

Can you tell us about how your team came up with the concept of MERRY JANE?

About 5 years ago, I was determining what our strategy would be in the cannabis space. We saw a market that was going to continue to evolve. Legalization was going to expand and we wanted to figure out what areas in the cannabis space would be most interesting and exciting to pursue.

There are other businesses that we have in the space, some are product related, some are investment related. We realized that there was an absence of a global media brand that can provide proprietary technologies and data/analytics for communication to the customer- endemic and non-endemic brands- that would want to reach this niche audience.

So then very similar to Rolling Stone with rock & roll, who turned these counter-cultures mainstream. We wanted an inflection point. We launched last September Snoop and I, and within a year we are the fastest growing cannabis media technology company in the world. We have launched everything from our web platform, mobile platform, television show on VH1 and one on MTV. We have some films coming out on Netflix. We have the world’s largest cannabis music festival 420 and then we did a 32 city North America tour with Live Nation.

How did the MERRY JANE Tour come about with Live Nation? Do you foresee more events like that coming up in the future?

Yes, we are talking to them about our next summer tour but how it came about was I think Snoop and Wiz had both discussed touring together for a while. And then since they are both partners in MERRY JANE, we knew that there would be a lot of conversation about them being leaders in the community and partnering together to do a tour. It just sort of came together.

I spoke with Live Nation and they understood that this is a lifestyle brand and a movement. That’s the sort of thing that I think that direct to consumer brands like Live Nation promoting events, are looking to own those niches with their venues and how they package up tours and live events. So putting it all under the banner of MERRY JANE made sense for them as well as us.

What are some obstacles you've had to overcome with tapping into the untouched market of Merry Jane and trying to take the movement globally?

Well it’s like any counter-culture going mainstream, you always have to sort of evangelize it. So you know we grow as the cannabis industry grows. At the same time, there is an install base with even the industry being legalized, with cannabis consumers and those that live the lifestyle and are curious about it, that don’t have a voice. So even if no other States or countries went legal, there are people smoking weed and consuming cannabis around the world regardless.

They still need a place to sort of meet and talk, enjoy content and learn news about the lifestyle regardless. So that install base is a fantastic group to access. But, some of the challenges are when we talk about them sort of expediting the growth, then obviously we want to be a part of the conversation of legalization and that’s important to us. That’s just a constant effort that we are invested in.

Then there’s also obviously, it’s sort of the reason why we exist, we decided to really expand our mobile and web presence because we realized that the larger our multi-platform approach, with more real estate it allows us to aggregate but the more we could serve the more endemic cannabis brands.

Obviously our advertisers include non-endemic brands like music videos and food and beverage companies. But when it comes to the endemic cannabis brands like vapor pens, there is a challenge with some of the content policies of these social media brands. So you’ll see a post go up on Instagram, it’ll exist for a year and then it gets taken down. Or, Facebook advertising doesn’t allow you to advertise cannabis related things but then it did and then it didn’t.

Like you can see it evolving with the decision makers. All these States that you can see onboarding and going legal, with just much more than half of the country on board with legal Statewide reasonable cannabis usage, I think you’ll start to see those policies change. Then the next thing that’s going to be our challenge is the global frontier. Right so cannabis is federally legal, you have international countries outside North America like Jamaica, Spain, Uruguay, that are joining in the conversation. That’s why I’m here speaking at a conference like this, because I just want to start to plant the seed.

You’ve got to start the dialogue. They’ve never had a cannabis panel at Web Summit before, right but now they do (or a cannabis speaker). So now I can talk about and start to make people think about the actual facts and effect of the cannabis industry being legal. So that’s my next challenge and mission is to evangelize the movement.

MerryJane.com

How do you go about finding content creators to collaborate with to keep the sites' stories current?

It’s a lot to do with our network, our Editor in Chief Noah Rubin is a big part of the editorial staff to help grow and excel the audience. He has a network of quality writers and we have a lot of people, who you know this is what happens when you put out a brand and you call out your mission statement. Ours is “Cannabis Culture for All” and we did so a lot of quality people came to us.

Writers that wanted to contribute and so forth that are very informed in the space. Also, sharp content creators, a production company as well for original content. Once the beacon was out there, we get a lot of talented incoming people that want to be part of the movement.

As someone who is in the process of creating my own online travel forum and app with my business partner, I’m curious were their many hiccups to overcome during the pre-launch of the site/app and what advice would you give to others working on launching their online communities?

I think I’m a little bit of a perfectionist and when you’re creating mobile and web platforms, you’ve got to learn to be flexible. If it were up to me I could have sat there and tried to perfect it for another 2 years. It really took our COO Scott Chung and it wasn’t the first time we’ve put out an app, but it’s probably the one that I’ve held most precious. I was really trying to wrap my head around every detail.

The beauty of online presence with both the web and mobile is that it’s constantly evolving, it’s constantly flexible. You only set your intention, but being first to market ended up being so much more important to us then having a perfect product, because it will never be perfect.

Our investment into dev in both mobile and web are constant. We’re constantly looking at user data and analytics in order to improve and try new things. We’ve launched our UGC app, Sesh, which is something we thought was an important part of the equation of our online platform.

I guess my advice is once you have something that you feel which encapsulates what your intentions are, put the product out and keep developing. Actually what you’ll learn from your audience is a lot more important than you think it could be as far as a product is concerned.

If you have a good idea, I look at my own consumer habits. I go to some sites like Worldstar Hip Hop or MediaTakeOut (MTO) and these are like originally pretty rudimentary, fairly poorly designed platforms but I go to them every day because I just like the content. So I just look at my own consumer habit, of course you want it to be streamlined and your back-end working with your front-end properly, but at the end of the day it’s just the content. If they want to check out what you have to offer, they’re going to come.

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