Mr. Peanut Enters the Protein Wars — With a New Agency Holding the Cane

A monocle, a top hat, a cane — and, as of this week, a new creative agency. Planters has appointed The Martin Agency as its creative agency of record, with a brief that amounts to dragging Mr. Peanut into the protein era.

The appointment, reported by Ad Age on September 2, came without a formal pitch process — a detail worth pausing on. Agency reviews of this size normally involve months of chemistry meetings and spec work. Handing the account over directly signals a client that already knew what it wanted and an agency that had already made its case.

The account sits inside Hormel Foods, which bought Planters from Kraft Heinz for $3.3 billion in 2021 — one of the largest packaged-food deals of that year. Hormel has been consistent since the day it closed: it does not think of itself as a snack company, it thinks of itself as a protein company. Peanuts, conveniently, are protein.

That is the strategic pivot the new work has to sell. For most of the last decade, Mr. Peanut has been a vehicle for stunt marketing — most infamously the 2020 Super Bowl arc in which the character was killed off and reborn as Baby Nut. The stunts generated coverage. They did not obviously generate a reason to choose Planters over the wall of protein bars, jerky and roasted chickpeas now occupying the same shelf.

Martin, based in Richmond and part of Omnicom, arrives with a recent record of making legacy characters and heritage brands feel current rather than curated. That is a narrower skill than it sounds. A 110-year-old mascot can be modernised into irrelevance very easily; the trick is changing what he stands for without changing who he is.

The brand has cycled through creative partners in recent years, including work led by VaynerMedia during the 2021 refresh that streamlined Mr. Peanut's look and added a plant-based protein seal to the pack. The visual identity has already been modernised, in other words. What has not been settled is the argument.

Campaign specifics and timing have not been disclosed. What has been disclosed is the ambition, and it is a bigger one than a mascot refresh: convince a shopper standing in the snack aisle that the man in the top hat belongs in the protein conversation.