Diego Pellicer gets a few minutes of buzz on French TV

Diego Pellicer Worldwide, the Seattle-born company that touts its destiny as a famous marijuana brand, has always been better at generating publicity than revenue.

Its latest PR coup is starring in a segment of a 60 Minutes-style news show broadcast June 9 on France 2, a French national public TV station.

Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen, move over: Now it’s Diego Pellicer Worldwide that’s big in France.

In the segment, titled “Weed on Wall Street,” the show’s reporters — a little like their 19th century predecessor Alexis de Tocqueville — make their way across the Land of the Free, from Seattle to Colorado to the New York Stock Exchange. They’re on the heels of Diego Pellicer CEO Douglas C. Anderson, who is described as a “Wall Street heavyweight who is in the midst of building a fortune.” (In his bio, Anderson boasts a career in financial services and investment advice.) The reporters say that “it’s the story of a trader who dreamed of becoming a dealer” — of marijuana, that is.

In a particularly entertaining part of the show, Anderson pilots his own helicopter over Seattle, takes them to a marijuana grower and to his home in Bellevue. There Anderson talks about his Mayflower roots and shows the French reporters a slideshow describing how he wants to put the Diego Pellicer brand on a line of clothing and other products.

Anderson also takes the crew to the retail location on First Avenue South in Sodo they describe as his store. (Actually, the company takes pains to note that it leases real estate to marijuana operations but at this point can’t sell or handle marijuana itself, lest it run afoul of federal law.)

With a little bit of research in publicly available federal filings, the would-be Mike Wallaces of France2 could have learned that Diego Pellicer Worldwide — which now lists its headquarters as Santa Monica, Calif. — is financially struggling and hardly impressing Wall Street.

It had a mere $39,000 in cash at the end of its latest quarter, while “its current liabilities exceed its current assets by $3,125,805,” the filings report. Its quarterly revenues were less than $87,000, while its net loss was close to $1 million.

But if they gathered that information, they left it on the cutting room floor.

Instead, the French reporters concluded that all that’s missing to convince “the big shots” of global finance that Anderson’s product is just like any other is … for Diego Pellicer to be traded on Nasdaq.

But “with the help of his powerful New York law firm, he’s working on it already,” they say.