For the second year in a row, our Director of Social Media, Chelsea Bates, has been nominated for ADCANN’s Marketer of the Year! It’s an honor that feels extra special because it recognizes exactly what Chelsea shows up with every single day. Since starting with Puf as one of our first interns, she has tapped into her intuition, and that has guided herself and her clients to success.
Keep reading to learn more about why Chelsea deserves your vote for Marketer of the Year.
Social Media Is on the Move
Before diving into strategy, Chelsea is always real about the fact that social media rewards momentum. Trends shift fast, attention spans shrink, and algorithms increasingly prioritize content that moves, literally and figuratively.
“With where social media is and where it’s heading, we need to ensure all content is created with the intention to grab attention and provide value. And it’s more difficult to do that with posts than it is with short-form. We’re seeing that across all platforms.” she shares. “If you see a short-form video with a hook to solve a problem you have, you’re going to be drawn to watching it because A. it immediately grabs your attention. B. you gain value quickly. And C. It’s entertaining. That’s the equation that we need to consider when asking ourselves what it takes for a social media account to have success.”
For Chelsea, the key is understanding how people consume, engage, and respond in real time.
Taking a BRAVE Approach to Social Media
One of Chelsea’s biggest wins this year was translating PufCreativ’s BRAVE Framework into a living, breathing system for the social media team. Instead of treating BRAVE like a checklist, she turned it into the backbone of how her team thinks, creates, and optimizes. Here’s how each pillar shows up in her process:
- Brave: “Hooks are everything. In a world where everyone is fighting for attention, your content has to make people stop scrolling. We build every post around a hook that actually speaks to our clients’ audiences.”
- Realistic: “Social only works when the brand has a real marketing foundation. You can’t expect social to do heavy lifting if the website, menu, or brand identity isn’t aligned. We partner best with brands who understand that.”
- Agile: “Compliance shifts constantly, especially in cannabis. We’re always monitoring changes and adjusting our workflow so our clients stay safe without losing creativity.”
- Valuable: “When in doubt, we rewrite. We never risk promoting consumption or sales in a way that violates platform rules. Our goal is to create educational, engaging content that adds value and keeps accounts protected.”
- Efficient: “Every piece of content we publish is rooted in data. If it doesn’t support our strategy or ladder up to our goals, it doesn’t go live. Period.”
By keeping this framework in place, Chelsea supports the social media squad and makes the Puf ecosystem more streamlined.
Always Changing with the Times
Chelsea’s expertise made her an expert in getting clients’ social media accounts reactivated after being taken down by Meta’s algorithm. But in the last year or so, Chelsea has noticed a shift in how cannabis social media accounts are affected by the powers that be.
“Meta has made algorithm changes to be more flexible than they used to be. A few years ago, we were seeing accounts get shut down by the algorithm after a number of cannabis-related posts. These days, we’ll see those flags possibly get flagged but they won’t be shut down unless someone, a real person or a real account, is actually going out of their way to report you.” she says.
And of course, the buzzword of the year has been “AI.” With AI being all over social media, it’s tempting to take the easy way out and use only computer generated content. However, Chelsea believes that AI can be used as a tool, but not as a crutch.
“I think that there’s a way to tastefully utilize AI. We use it to give us structure in the ideating phase, but then we take those ideas and then allow our real human creativity to be the one to create off of that,” she explains. “That’s the exact reason why we’ve decided to move towards working with brand ambassadors because it’s a real human experience.”
Chelsea’s forward-thinking approach keeps our clients ahead.
Vote for Chelsea Bates, Queen of Collaboration
Above all else, what really drives Chelsea is the connection she has with her team and her clients.
“Collaboration and communication are huge values for me and working in a department where we all have a cohesive understanding on what each person needs to do to make sure that those needs are met brings me a lot of fulfillment” she says. “Whether it’s from the initial strategy and calls all the way down to the deliverables, it feels that our team had cohesion in our shared vision of what we want to accomplish and how we can accomplish it together.”
We are so proud of leadership, creativity, and relentless dedication to pushing cannabis marketing forward. Her ADCANN nomination is a reflection of the impact she makes every single day on her team, our clients, and the industry as a whole.
Help Chelsea Bates win ADCANN’s Marketer of the Year 2025! Follow this link and cast your vote!
