They Say That Indies Can’t Help Brands Scale. That’s a Bunch of Horse Kicks

Conagra calls on Cornett for its in-house media reboot across Slim Jim, Banquet, Marie Callender's and more iconic brands.

Conagra Brands has tapped Cornett — the female-owned, Lexington-based independent media and marketing agency — as its Strategic Media Execution Partner. The win lands as Conagra rebuilds the engine room of its marketing operation, pulling strategy and digital activation in-house and reshaping its agency roster around speed, transparency and integration.

A CPG giant decides to own its media

Conagra is one of the largest food companies in North America, with a pantry that runs from Slim Jim to Healthy Choice to Orville Redenbacher’s. Rebuilding the media model for a broad portfolio is a structural rethink, not a tweak.

The work is being led by Peter Choi, Conagra’s vice president of Marketing, who spent nearly two decades at Procter & Gamble before joining the company. Choi’s stated ambition is to build a Marketing Center of Excellence that brings planning, activation and measurement closer to the brands, with Conagra’s own people, data and tech doing more of the heavy lifting.

“We’re building how Conagra plans, activates and measures media in-house,” Choi said. “This allows us to leverage the full power and scale of our people, resources, and data science capabilities. We need an agency with boldness and conviction to help bring that transformation to life. Cornett understands what we are building, and we are excited to partner with an agency that shares our vision.”

Why Cornett got the call

According to the announcement, Cornett came through a rigorous RFP and demonstrated the strategic capability, operational agility and senior-level engagement Conagra wanted to support its evolving media model. Under the new partnership, the agency will provide advisory and support for in-house media planning and buying across a roster of iconic brands: Slim Jim, Banquet, Marie Callender’s, Healthy Choice, Orville Redenbacher’s, RO*TEL and FATTY. Independent agency Hunterblu Media will also support Cornett through performance media surge capacity.

Christy Hiler on what indie brings to the room

For Cornett CEO and owner Christy Hiler, the partnership is a chance to put the agency’s posture into practice on a national stage. Hiler is also a co-founder of OWN IT — the initiative and podcast she launched with Zambezi CEO Jean Freeman to recognize, support and grow female-owned advertising agencies, a community that still represents less than 1% of the industry.

“This is what it looks like when a brand decides to take full ownership of its media destiny. Conagra is building something genuinely new, and we’re honored to be part of it,” Hiler said. “We’re not afraid to be bold, and we don’t hide behind layers. That same energy is what we’re bringing to this partnership every day.”

The big-holding-co playbook for a client like Conagra would be a tower of layers — strategy, planning, activation, measurement, all stacked between the work and the work. Cornett’s pitch is the opposite: fewer layers, senior people in the right seats.

The bigger picture for indies and CPG

It’s still rare to see a top-tier CPG advertiser hand a core media role to an independent. Conagra’s choice signals a few things worth marking. In-housing continues to gain ground, but brands still want outside partners with sharp points of view and the ability to move fast. The female-owned, founder-led independent isn’t an “alternative” pick anymore.

For the indie agency community, this one’s worth watching. If the model works at Conagra, more CMOs will draw the same diagram on the same whiteboard.

About that headline

In the interest of full transparency: the original draft of our headline used a saltier turn of phrase that rhymes with “horse kicks.” We thought better of it. Horse Kicks is the cleaner version, and the press release didn’t mention it anyway — but it’s the better callback, and a useful answer to the “can indies scale?” question that always shadows announcements like this one.

Horse Kicks was a 2022 Cornett campaign for VisitLEX, the tourism bureau for Lexington, Kentucky. The agency partnered with Lexington-based sneaker artist Marcus Floyd, who took hyped Air Jordans, Yeezys and New Balances apart and reconstructed them as premium “horseshoes” for equine athletes. A stunt built around the Breeders’ Cup at Keeneland turned into a real brand with real product and real demand.

The results, per Cornett and VisitLEX: more than three billion earned media impressions and an estimated $103 million in advertising value for VisitLEX. The campaign won Ad Age’s Small Agency Experiential Campaign of the Year in July 2023, along with awards from the Clios, the Shortys, the HSMAI Adrian Awards and the National ADDYs. Cornett itself was named Ad Age Small Agency of the Year in 2021. Worth keeping in mind when picking who’s at the table for a CPG portfolio.