Cool Nerds is the closest agency to us in shape. Paid media on Meta, TikTok and Google. Retail media on Walmart Connect and Instacart. Amazon Ads and DSP. Retail marketing, product launch and brand activation. And — unusually, and to their credit — they publish original annual research: a Consumer Products Digital report and a Social Media report, built from the campaigns they run. Their roster includes Herrs, Poppi, Eggo, Meiji America and Pierre's Ice Cream.
So this is a narrow comparison and we will not inflate it. They publish, we publish. They run retail media, we run retail media. The honest difference is where the research comes from, and it is a real difference rather than a big one.
Last verified 1 September 2026 · Cool Nerds facts sourced from coolnerdsmarketing.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.
Both of us publish research, which is rarer in this category than it should be. But the two bodies of work are built from different raw material and they answer different questions. Cool Nerds describe their reports as built from the campaigns they run every day. Ours are built from surveying buyers and from classifying a corpus of ads we did not run. Here is what each one can actually tell you.
Raw material: performance data from accounts the agency runs.
Raw material: survey work at category scale, qualitative, and a corpus of ads we did not place.
The useful version of this: if your question is "what should we expect from Meta this quarter," campaign-derived data is the better source and theirs is real. If your question is "why is anybody choosing the pack next to ours," no amount of campaign data will tell you, because the answer lives with people who never saw the ad.
Report descriptions taken from coolnerdsmarketing.com, 2 September 2026, where the annual reports are described as built from the campaigns they run every day. The limitations listed under each column are inherent to the method, not criticisms of either agency's execution — ours has the second set whether we like it or not.
| Capability | Schaefer | Cool Nerds |
|---|---|---|
| Paid social — Meta, TikTok, Google | ✓ | ✓ |
| Amazon retail media | ✓ | ✓ |
| Walmart Connect and Instacart | ✓ | ✓ |
| Original research published openly | ✓ | ✓ |
| Food & beverage exclusively | ✓ | – |
| Research fielded with buyers, not derived from campaigns | ✓ | – |
| Searchable ad corpus, free and public | ✓ | – |
| Target and Kroger retail media | ✓ | – |
| Shopper activation — Fetch, Social Nature, Aisle | ✓ | – |
| Written performance guarantee | ✓ | – |
| Pricing range published | ✓ | – |
| Amazon DSP named as a service | – | ✓ |
| Influencer marketing | – | ✓ |
| Brand activation and product launch | – | ✓ |
The fourth row is a tie and worth pausing on: publishing original research at all puts Cool Nerds in a very small group in this category, and we would rather compete with agencies that do it. Amazon DSP goes to them — it is named on their site and not on ours. Grey dashes mean not published on their site rather than absent, and on a page this close that caveat carries more weight than usual: ask them.
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.
Platform benchmarks and realistic expectations from live spend, or why a category buys and what non-customers believe. Both are legitimate questions with different sources.
They name Walmart Connect and Instacart plus Amazon Ads and DSP. We add Target, Kroger and shopper activation. If your plan sits inside the first list, this row does not separate us.
Go and read both. Poppi, Eggo and Herrs is a strong roster and if it maps more closely to your category and scale than ours does, that is a better signal than anything on this page.
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 →Two agencies that both publish? Ask us the research question.
Work With Us →