
Wellness Brands Walk The FDA-FTC Tightrope
How wellness and health technology brands navigate FDA and FTC rules when making product claims, and the communications habits that keep marketing both persuasive and defensible.

How wellness and health technology brands navigate FDA and FTC rules when making product claims, and the communications habits that keep marketing both persuasive and defensible.

Hemp PR is not wellness PR with cannabis vocabulary bolted on. It is regulated wellness communications — every claim a legal exposure, every product page a compliance document. The 2018 Farm Bill set the federal definition; FDA, FTC, and the states all enforce.

The mental health PR landscape requires a unique approach due to its regulatory complexity, patient-safety implications, and the dynamics of celebrity disclosures. This article explores the strategies that work, and those that don't, for brands in this specialized category, offering insights into building sustained category position beyond traditional consumer marketing tactics.

THC and CBD sit under different rules, platform policies and buyer expectations. This piece explains where the two categories diverge in distribution and where their communications discipline stays the same.

Mayweather $614K + Khaled $152K (Nov 2018 Centra Tech). Kardashian $1.26M (Oct 3 2022 EthereumMax). The March 22 2023 SEC sweep — Lindsay Lohan, Akon, Soulja Boy, Ne-Yo, Lil Yachty re: Justin Sun/Tron. The FTX celebrity class action: Brady, Gisele, Curry, Larry David, Shaq, O'Leary.

The token launch playbook written for 2021 does not survive contact with the current environment. Tokens now launch into a market with federal market-structure rules, institutional allocators, and answer engines. This is the operating playbook for launching a token in 2026.

Enterprise procurement is asking AI vendors questions that didn't exist 18 months ago. Data residency, training data provenance, hallucination rates, bias auditing, regulatory disclosure posture, vendor lock-in risk. AI companies selling to enterprise need a communications framework that anticipates the procurement questions and answers them publicly.

Cannabis operators face crisis exposure across categories few consumer brands match in combination: product safety, regulatory enforcement, license risk, financial restatement, executive matters, and reputation in a category where cultural acceptance is still evolving. Eight crisis categories, mock recall simulations, regulator-response tabletops, four-level escalation trees, dispensary communications, investor sequencing, and recovery in years not quarters.