Illinois cannabis at scale, compliantly.

Illinois has the most operational scale of any cannabis market we run. Adult-use dispensary density across Cook County and the collar counties is high, the consumer base is broad, and the regulatory framework — while real — is workable for paid media in a way Massachusetts only barely is and most other regulated markets aren't at all. The Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act and the rules promulgated under it govern audience composition, venue restrictions, and creative review, and we handle that work upstream of every Illinois cannabis flight.

The Chicago metro's geography makes the venue work easier here than in most regulated markets. The dense corridor from River North through West Loop, Wicker Park, Logan Square, and the Lincoln Park residential extension carries a venue mix that maps cleanly to compliant audience composition. The collar counties — particularly the Naperville-Aurora corridor and the Lake County extension up to the Wisconsin line — carry suburban dispensary catchments that benefit from cross-corridor reach into the Chicago network.

Daypart weighting in Chicago is sports-heavy at a level matched only by Boston. Bears Sundays carry the single highest-density window in the network — the audience composition during a Bears game in a Chicago sports bar is exactly the adult-use consumer the operators are trying to reach. Bulls, Blackhawks, Cubs, and Sox dayparts add additional weight across the calendar year. Cannabis flights in Chicago weight heavily toward those windows because the sports-bar audience and the dispensary visit-pattern overlap harder here than almost anywhere else.

Geo-fenced programmatic stacks cleanly on top because Chicago dispensary geography is dense enough across the metro and the collar counties that a five-mile-radius layer around retail picks up the bar TV exposure list and converts it through to menu and pickup orders. The collar-county layer is particularly effective in Naperville, Schaumburg, and the western suburbs where the residential dispensary catchment overlaps with the bar TV venue footprint.

Rideshare is situational. Strongest in the dense River North and West Loop corridor on Friday and Saturday nights, where the post-bar ride window aligns with the adult-use consumer's late-night purchase pattern. Most Chicago cannabis operators don't authorize the late-night exposure without additional review, but where they do, the rideshare layer produces meaningful incremental visit lift.

Recent: an Illinois-licensed multi-location operator running sixteen weeks of bar TV across the dense downtown and near-northwest corridor venue list, weighted toward Bears Sundays and Bulls-Blackhawks primetime, with a parallel geo-fenced programmatic layer running against the operator's Cook County and collar-county retail footprint. Visit lift held in the upper end of our typical range across both the urban and suburban dispensary catchments.