Cannabis marketing on social media comes with an unusual problem. A business can legally sell its products in New York, yet talking about those same products on Instagram, TikTok and other major platforms can quickly run into restrictions.
Gotham Cannabis Dispensary needed another way in.
Instead of trying to force conventional cannabis advertising through platforms that weren’t particularly welcoming to it, Gotham put one of its own employees in front of the camera. That employee was Rachel Bell, a content marketer who would eventually become a creator in her own right.
The experiment became much bigger than a workaround. Bell’s “Hi, I’m High” series has generated more than 11 million views across platforms, helped Gotham build sizable social audiences and picked up both Clio and Webby recognition along the way.
Gotham Needed a Different Kind of Cannabis Marketing
Gotham brought Bell onboard as director of content and engagement in January 2023, shortly before opening its first location in New York City’s Bowery neighborhood. The company later expanded to several additional locations, but social media remained a difficult channel because cannabis promotion sits in a particularly restricted category. Traditional paid advertising, direct product promotion and straightforward calls to purchase can quickly trigger platform rules, so Gotham needed a different route. Bell’s solution was to make the content itself entertaining enough that audiences would watch without feeling as though they were sitting through a conventional cannabis advertisement.
“Hi, I’m High” Found a Way Around the Usual Product Pitch
Bell developed “Hi, I’m High,” a video series built around her exploring New York City, visiting events and landmarks while experiencing the effects of Gotham products. The format doesn’t lean heavily on product shots or hard selling. Bell is the focus, and the experience becomes the story. That helped Gotham create something closer to creator entertainment than branded advertising. Bell could also naturally work Gotham merchandise into episodes, giving the company another way to connect content with commerce without turning every clip into a sales pitch. According to Digiday, merchandise appearing in the series has sometimes seen noticeable sales increases, with one featured item becoming Gotham’s top-selling product for a month.
Bell Was Building Online Communities Long Before Gotham
Bell’s move into creator-led marketing didn’t come from nowhere. As a teenager, she built a Facebook audience of more than 8,000 people around daily status updates written as poems. After college, she worked in content marketing for apartment subletting platform Flip, where memes became part of the company’s social strategy. Several marketing roles followed before Gotham founder and CEO Joanne Wilson contacted Bell on Twitter toward the end of 2022 after seeing her previous work. Bell joined Gotham a few months later, bringing with her an instinct for internet culture that proved useful once the company started experimenting with creator-style formats.
Gotham’s Social Audience Started Moving
The audience growth eventually followed the content. Even when Gotham wasn’t publishing “Hi, I’m High” consistently, the series helped push its Instagram following to around 10,000 during the first year. Bell later shifted toward a more regular biweekly publishing schedule, and Gotham’s Instagram audience continued to grow, eventually approaching 60,000 followers. The company also expanded the format beyond Instagram. Longer versions began appearing on YouTube in 2025, while TikTok became another distribution channel despite the platform’s cautious approach to cannabis-related content. Across social platforms, “Hi, I’m High” has now accumulated more than 11 million views, turning what began as a marketing workaround into one of Gotham’s most recognizable pieces of content.
Awards Turned a Marketing Experiment Into Something Bigger
Industry recognition followed surprisingly quickly. “Hi, I’m High” received a Clio Award in 2023, not long after the series launched, and went on to win a Webby Award for branded video and film series in 2026. Those awards pushed the project beyond being simply a clever cannabis campaign. The bigger idea was that Gotham had found a creator inside its own company. Rather than hiring an influencer for individual sponsored posts, the brand gave an employee enough space to develop a recognizable personality and recurring format. Bell didn’t disappear behind the Gotham logo. She became part of what people were actually coming back to watch.
Gotham Is Starting to Think More Like a Media Company
Gotham is no longer treating “Hi, I’m High” as a one-off campaign. The company is developing merchandise around the series and has additional branded series in production. Bell described the broader approach to Digiday as programming Gotham’s social channels almost like a television network. That mindset changes the usual social media question. Instead of constantly asking what a brand should post today, the focus becomes which shows, recurring formats and personalities audiences might deliberately return to. In increasingly crowded feeds, that can make a difference. A recognizable series gives people a reason to return, while a recognizable host gives them someone to build familiarity with.
Rachel Bell Became a Creator Along the Way
Bell’s own profile has grown alongside Gotham’s. Her personal Instagram following climbed from around 12,000 when the series began to roughly 50,000, according to Digiday. She has also started receiving invitations to appear in other productions and has hired a manager as new creator opportunities emerge. Even her dog, Ernie, has become part of her content and appeared often enough to lead to a partnership with a dog food company. It creates an interesting crossover between employment and creator work. Bell started as the person responsible for Gotham’s content strategy, but the content eventually turned her into a recognizable personality with opportunities extending beyond the company itself.
What Gotham’s Creator Strategy Says About Brand Content
The bigger lesson isn’t that every business should immediately put a marketing employee in front of a camera. Gotham’s experience shows that brands may already have potential creators inside their own teams. Someone working within the business can understand its tone, audience and culture in a way an outside influencer might take months to learn. When that person receives enough creative freedom and a strong recurring format, the content can start feeling less like advertising and more like something people choose to watch. Gotham’s platform restrictions forced the company to experiment, but the result became something much more valuable. Instead of finding another way to push cannabis ads, Gotham ended up building a creator-led media strategy around a personality audiences already wanted to follow.
A Different Model for the Creator Economy
Bell’s story also points to a wider shift in the creator economy. Brands are no longer limited to choosing between traditional employees and outside influencers. The lines are beginning to blur. Employees can become public-facing creators, creators can become part of internal marketing teams and branded social accounts can start operating more like entertainment channels. Gotham’s experience is a useful example of how that model can work when the person, format and brand voice actually fit together. What started as a solution to advertising restrictions became an award-winning content franchise, and Bell’s role evolved with it.
Sources
Digiday — How a content marketer became an award-winning cannabis creator
https://digiday.com/media/how-a-content-marketer-became-an-award-winning-cannabis-creator/
Digiday — Creator Playbook
https://digiday.com/series/creator-playbook/
