• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, August 12, 2015

San Francisco-based agency Odysseus Arms has been awarded creative advertising duties for Foster Farms’ Corn Dogs brand.

The food company said it was particularly impressed with the agency’s consumer listening technique, which it believes will help boost the effectiveness of the brand’s advertising.

“Odysseus Arms has an impressive body of work and brings a unique approach to teasing out consumer insights that really stood out,” said Emily Fleischmann, senior marketing manager, prepared foods at Foster Farms. “We are excited to have them as a partner in development of breakthrough communication on Foster Farms Corn Dogs.”

“We’re getting really personal with our research,” said Franklin Tipton, a partner at the agency. “Drilling down to find out what consumers in our target market really care about. Our consumer listening process has dramatically improved our integrated campaign results, attracting big national brands like Gallo and now Foster Farms.”

The agency, which launched in 2011, has also crafted campaigns for NBC/Universal’s E! network, YouTube and Capital One.

Agency partner Libby Brockhoff oversees the shop’s listening technique. It consists of building “tribes” of two dozen or more consumers in the target market, then spending over 100 real-time hours with those segmented consumer groups to discern their likes, dislikes and responses to various types of creative messaging.

According to Brockhoff, this approach “steers away from current agency trends where they base their insights on customers from a cursory look at big data—our entire agency is spending time with the people we are targeting.”