Meet Vee Popat & About ColaDigital

This page is the foundation for everything else you'll read on ColaDigital.

Most About pages try to tell you why a company is different. That's never been my goal. I'd rather explain how I think, what shaped that thinking, and how it influences the recommendations we make every day.

It also serves another purpose. As ColaDigital has grown, so have our services, educational resources, case studies, and commercial pages.

That clarity has become even more important as AI Overviews change how cannabis businesses are summarized and recommended. Clear entity relationships make it easier for both people and search systems to understand who's behind the advice.

Instead of each page trying to explain who I am or what the agency stands for, they can point back here. That keeps the story consistent for prospective clients, search engines, and AI systems.

If you want to understand the thinking behind our recommendations before exploring individual services, read our cannabis marketing methodology. It explains how we diagnose problems, prioritize work, and decide when SEO, advertising, consulting, or content should come first.

Think of this as the starting point. The rest of the website builds on what's explained here instead of repeating it.

I usually ignore the first problem a client tells me.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who sells marketing services, but I've learned the first problem isn't always the real one.

Someone says they need SEO. Another says Google Ads stopped working. Someone else thinks they need more content. Those might all be true, but they're often conclusions rather than diagnoses.

I spend a lot more time asking questions than people expect. What changed? What was working before? Where do customers disappear? Which pages actually generate enquiries? If tomorrow's revenue depended on fixing one thing, what would you fix first?

Eventually a pattern starts to appear. That's usually where the real work begins.

Once the diagnosis is clear, choosing the right service usually isn't that difficult. Getting to the diagnosis is the part that deserves the attention.

• How I think about cannabis marketing
• Experience behind ColaDigital
• Why cannabis marketing is different
• How ColaDigital approaches the work
• What each service owns
• Proof, trust, and decision support
• Resources and case study routing
• Media, interviews, and author authority
• FAQs

Twenty years of experience changed the questions I ask.

When I started in SEO, success was usually measured by rankings and traffic. Those still matter, but they don't tell the whole story anymore. A page can rank well and still create confusion. A campaign can generate clicks without generating customers. A website can publish hundreds of pages and become less useful with every one.

Experience has made me less interested in individual tactics and more interested in understanding why something is happening. That's where better decisions usually come from.

I've become more comfortable saying, "I don't think SEO is your biggest problem," when that's what the evidence shows. Sometimes that's the most valuable advice I can give.

Cannabis doesn't usually reward one-channel thinking.

One reason I enjoy working in this industry is that simple answers rarely hold up for long. Strong organic visibility won't compensate for weak conversion. Paid media can't fix confusing positioning. Great content won't overcome poor page ownership. Every part influences the others.

That's why I rarely look at one marketing channel in isolation. I want to understand how search, local visibility, paid acquisition, the website, compliance, reporting, and the buying experience affect each other before recommending where to invest.

Different businesses. Different constraints.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is assuming every cannabis business needs the same marketing strategy. A neighbourhood dispensary, a multi-location retailer, a cannabis brand, and a medical cannabis business might all use SEO or paid media, but they're solving completely different problems.

That's why I try to understand the business model before recommending the channel. The tactics usually change once the commercial objective becomes clear.

The industries have changed. The process hasn't.

I don't think success starts with rankings anymore.

Earlier in my career, I probably paid more attention to rankings than I should have. They were easy to measure, clients asked about them, and they felt like progress.

Over time I started noticing something uncomfortable. Some of the highest-ranking pages weren't helping the business very much, while pages with less traffic were generating enquiries, sales, and better conversations.

That changed how I look at websites.

Now I'm more interested in whether a page deserves to exist than whether it can rank. Does it answer a distinct question? Does it help someone make a decision? Does it strengthen the website, or does it compete with another page that's already trying to do the same job?

How ColaDigital approaches the work

I don't start by asking which deliverables a client wants. I start by trying to understand what is preventing the business from generating more qualified demand.

Sometimes the answer is obvious. A website has technical issues. A location page is too thin. A paid campaign is sending traffic to the wrong page. Other times the problem is harder to see because the symptoms are spread across search, content, ads, tracking, conversion, and the business itself.

That's where a simple process becomes useful.

Simple on purpose.

The process only works if the recommendation can be explained in plain language. If I can't explain why a specific service should come first, I don't think it should be sold first.

If the first move isn't clear yet, the Cannabis Marketing Service Selector can help narrow the path before a service conversation starts.

I don't think marketing services should compete with each other.

One thing that's bothered me for years is how agencies often package every service as if it can solve every problem. SEO promises growth. Ads promise growth. Content promises growth. Consulting promises growth. Eventually everything starts sounding interchangeable.

I don't think that's helpful.

Every service at ColaDigital has a specific job. If a recommendation starts drifting into another service's responsibility, either the recommendation or the service needs to change.

Clear ownership makes the website easier to understand. More importantly, it makes recommendations easier to trust.

The best projects feel like conversations, not transactions.

I don't expect clients to understand SEO the way I do, just like I wouldn't expect to understand their business as well as they do on day one.

The best work happens when both sides are willing to challenge assumptions. I'll ask a lot of questions. Sometimes I'll disagree with the obvious answer. I expect clients to do the same with me if something doesn't make sense.

That usually leads to better decisions than either of us would have made independently.

Good marketing isn't built by one expert. It's built when different kinds of expertise come together around the same problem.

Trust usually starts when someone realizes I'm willing to disagree.

Some of the strongest client relationships I've had started with me recommending something smaller than they expected. Not because I was trying to win trust, but because it genuinely seemed like the right place to start.

I've recommended delaying advertising until the website was ready. I've suggested consolidating pages instead of publishing more. I've encouraged businesses to spend time understanding the problem before committing to a larger engagement.

Those conversations aren't always the easiest ones to have, but they've shaped the kind of agency I wanted ColaDigital to become.

I think people should know who's behind the advice they're reading.

One reason this page exists is to make that relationship clear. When someone reads a ColaDigital guide, service page, or resource, they should know who's responsible for the thinking behind it. I don't believe founder pages exist to impress people. They exist because if you're trusting someone with your business, you deserve to know where the advice comes from.

Before focusing on cannabis, my background included digital marketing, media relations, artist promotion, and the music industry. In 2015, a social media campaign for a family-owned Niagara Falls attraction unexpectedly attracted international attention and was featured by media outlets including CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, CTV, Time, Fast Company, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, HuffPost, BuzzFeed, SFGATE, MSN, and many others. It reinforced something I've believed ever since: attention is only valuable if it creates meaningful business results.

That campaign was also recognized in Scott Stratten's The Book of Business Awesome / UnAwesome, where the case study was included in the Hall of Fame "Awesome" section. It was an early reminder that creative marketing works best when it supports a measurable business objective rather than chasing attention for its own sake.

More recently, I've spoken about cannabis marketing, SEO, and search visibility on the TOAST Podcast, now known as The Bakery, with Riel Roussopoulos. Those conversations reflect the same approach you'll find throughout ColaDigital: practical thinking, commercial context, and recommendations shaped by experience instead of trends.

Everything I've done has shaped how I approach marketing today.

I studied Business Management with a Marketing major and a minor in International Marketing at Ryerson University, now Toronto Metropolitan University. It gave me a solid understanding of markets, positioning, customer behaviour, and the commercial side of marketing, but most of what I rely on today came from applying those ideas in the real world.

Before focusing on cannabis, I spent more than a decade working in the music industry across artist marketing, radio promotion, and media relations. It taught me that attention is easy to celebrate but much harder to convert into meaningful business results.

That lesson still influences almost every recommendation I make. Rankings, traffic, impressions, and reach all matter, but only if they help a business become easier to find, easier to trust, and easier to choose.