Bigeye is a generalist agency that takes research seriously. Consumer Research and Insights leads their service list, they run a proprietary insights platform called EyeQ, and they publish performance media across more than 50 retail media networks. They also serve CPG, pet, beauty, wellness, home goods and DTC alongside food and beverage. That is six categories of pattern to hold in one head. We hold one, we publish the evidence for it, and we put our fees behind the result.
We wrote this, so discount it accordingly. One row on the matrix below goes to Bigeye outright and we have left it there rather than explain it away, because it is the honest answer for some readers.
Last verified 1 September 2026 · Bigeye facts sourced from bigeyeagency.com
How narrow is the category focus, and how far does the work go past creative into running and measuring media. Everyone in the F&B agency conversation sits somewhere on this grid.
Positions drawn from each agency's own published service list and stated industry focus, September 2026. Not a quality ranking.
Bigeye publish more than 50 retail media networks. We publish five, plus three shopper activation platforms they do not name. On the headline count they win, and we have left that row in the matrix below. But retail networks are category-specific, not interchangeable — a list long enough to serve pet, beauty, wellness and home goods is mostly made of networks that are not in your aisle. So the useful question is narrower than the count.
All eight run by us. None of the last three are named on their site — shopper activation is a food and beverage discipline, so a six-category agency has less reason to build it.
A network count scales with how many categories you serve, not with how deeply you run any of them. Six categories means six retailer sets, and the honest version of a 50-network list is that most of it belongs to somebody else's aisle.
That is a real advantage if you sell pet food and shampoo as well as snacks. It is not an advantage if you sell snacks, because you cannot spend on a network your buyers do not shop.
The first question usually returns three or four names. The second one is where a long list stops being an argument.
Bigeye's 50-plus figure is their own published claim and we have not audited it; we have no reason to doubt it. Our eight are the networks and activation platforms we run. We are not suggesting their breadth is fake — we are suggesting breadth and depth are different purchases, and that a count answers the wrong question for a single-category brand.
| Capability | Schaefer | Bigeye |
|---|---|---|
| Food & beverage exclusively | ✓ | – |
| Written performance guarantee | ✓ | – |
| Ad corpus public and free to search before signing | ✓ | – |
| Published category research report | ✓ | – |
| Research method published openly | ✓ | – |
| Category tier benchmarks published before your account opens | ✓ | – |
| Shopper activation — Fetch, Social Nature, Aisle | ✓ | – |
| Pricing range published | ✓ | – |
| Team structure published: who runs research, creative and media | ✓ | – |
| Consumer research as a named first-class service | ✓ | ✓ |
| Research fielded in-house rather than commissioned out | ✓ | ✓ |
| Retail media — Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Target, Kroger | ✓ | ✓ |
| Paid media buying and management | ✓ | ✓ |
| 50+ retail media networks published | – | ✓ |
| Marketing analytics and SEO as named services | – | ✓ |
Nine rows to us, four ties, one to Bigeye and one we refer out. Read the fourteenth row carefully before you take the count as a verdict: 50-plus published networks against our eight is real, and the section above is our argument about why a count answers the wrong question rather than a denial that they have more. Every grey dash means the capability is not published on their site, not that it is absent — that distinction matters most on the ninth row, where we publish our team structure and they simply do not, which is a difference in disclosure and not proof of anything about how they work. Ask them.
Both of us lead with research, so the word is doing no work on its own. What separates us is what happens to the insight after the study closes. A platform is built to return a comparable finding in any category, which is exactly what you need when you serve six. A team is built to keep the finding and get better at one category with it.
Optimised for comparability. The study is the deliverable.
The same process works for pet food and for shampoo, which is the point of building it. What it gives up is the tacit part — the things the person who watched the responses come in knows and never wrote down.
Optimised for compounding. The study is an input, and the team keeps it.
This only works because we do one category — the judgement would not compound across six, and we would not try. That is the trade, and we made it deliberately.
Our description of the platform model is inferred from what Bigeye publishes about EyeQ, not from inside knowledge of how they staff engagements — ask them how many people touch an insight before it becomes an ad, because we may be wrong about their answer. Everything on our side of the diagram is checkable: the corpus is public.
Research is not a report we hand over and leave. It is the input to the creative, which is the input to the media, which is measured back against it. Pull any one of them out and the other three get worse.
Category-scale survey work plus qualitative, fielded and analysed by our own team. The people who read the data are the people who brief the creative, so nothing is lost in a handoff.
How the research works →Concepts built against each motivation the research surfaced, at the volume the platforms need before they can learn anything. Brief, design, copy, test.
See the creative process →Meta, TikTok and Pinterest, structured as a test against the research rather than run on platform defaults and hope.
See how paid social runs →Retail media, search and streaming across Amazon, Walmart Connect, Instacart, Target and Kroger, plus shopper activation through Fetch, Social Nature and Aisle — all measured against the number we agreed at the start.
See the full media scope →If the honest answer sends you elsewhere, we would rather you found that out here than four months into a retainer.
Pet, beauty, wellness, home goods. They cover all of it under one roof and we would turn the work down. That is not a close call.
Not how many an agency can name — how many you will spend on next year. If it is three or four and they are the grocery and marketplace set, a 50-network list buys you nothing you will use.
This is the question a generalist finds hardest to answer, because a guarantee on one category is a bet you can price and a guarantee across six is not. Ours is written down: 100% of fees back in three months. They do not publish one — ask them why.
Every answer here is one we would give on a call. Publishing them just means fewer wasted calls.
Three results from food and beverage brands. Every one started with research into why the category buys, not with a media plan.
Research replaced a 30–45 year-old grill dad with a retiree over 65. Conversion rates doubled. Not one additional dollar of media spend.
Read the case study →We rebuilt the best-customer cohort, re-pointed the budget behind it, and fed the platforms a volume of creative the brand had not run before.
Read the case study →A competitive landscape study surfaced an entire product line inside existing capability — and an $80M category opportunity.
See the work →We work food and beverage brands spending $5,000–$500,000 a month across paid social and retail media, and every engagement starts with buyer research.
Most agencies do not offer one because they do not want the pressure. Ours is the reason we turn work down — it only holds up if we are honest at intake about whether we can move your number.
ROAS, CPA, conversion rate, revenue growth or foot traffic — named before anything launches, so there is nothing to argue about afterwards.
Not at contract signing. Research runs first, two to three weeks, and the three months begin when the ads do.
100% of our agency fees for the period. No negotiation, no process to go through, no exceptions.
And if it isn't, we'll say so on the first call rather than the fourth month.
Work With Us →Weighing a generalist against a specialist? Ask us both.
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