Land O’Lakes, a multi-billion-dollar cooperative of farmers, sponsors a stock image collection and launches a toolkit for the entertainment industry to help portray rural America as a vibrant community.
Chief Marketing Officer Heather Malenshek isn’t sure if Land O’Lakes Inc.’s latest marketing initiative will sell more butter. But that wasn’t the original intent of the push anyway, she said.
Malenshek recently represented the Fortune 500 cooperative on a panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival about changing the way the entertainment industry depicts rural America in films.
Several entertainment industry executives joined Malenshek on the January panel, including Amanda Farrand, Executive Vice President of Business and Brand Development at Imagine Entertainment. They discussed a new toolkit that Imagine and Land O’Lakes recently developed. The toolkit aims to provide the media and entertainment industry with more accurate imaginary and information about rural America.
The educational materials include themes and character ideas, demographics and the history of how TV has portrayed rural America. For example, the toolkit suggests to storytellers: “Forms of work outside of agriculture are underrepresented, so showing other types of work can add depth and authenticity to portrayals of rural communities.”
Why Authentic Representation Matters
The toolkit is a part of the brand’s larger platform — the Modern Rural Collective — which is a network of storytellers, marketers and brands with the mission of authentic representation of rural America. The goal is to “change the narrative” in how rural America shows up on TV, in movies and in articles. The entertainment industry today, Malenshek said, most commonly depicts rural America as a place that is in decline and full of under-educated people, or a romanticized “Hallmark” ideal. Instead, Land O’Lakes is aiming for a more authentic picture for rural America, which is a vibrant community central to the country’s food supply.
“What we are trying to show is the diversity of rural America — the fact that it is not just agriculture; it’s not just the opposite of urban,” Malenshek said. “There are people launching businesses there. There’s a lot of entrepreneurship there. There’s a lot of innovation there.”
This matters to Land O’Lakes as it is a cooperative comprised of farmers. These member owners live and work in rural America, and they care how the media portrays them in the world, she said. A fundamental part of its brand is advocating for rural America and being true to its roots as a cooperative, and this fulfills that mission, she said.
Beyond the direct-to-consumer dairy products Land O’Lakes sells, it also has large operations in animal feed and agricultural production, such as its subsidiary WinField United. In 2024, Land O’Lakes’ annual sales were $16.2 billion, according to the brand.
Addressing the ‘Visual Gap’ With Getty Images
Another part of this initiative is bridging the “visual gap” of the images depicting rural America, such as a photo on a news article. To address this, Land O’Lakes worked with stock image database Getty Images to create a collection of authentic images of rural America open for commercial, editorial or personal use.
After about a year of research of the current stock images of rural life on Getty, Land O’Lakes identified gaps, such as a need for more pictures of people of color and more accurate pictures of young people and women. For example, images often depicted young people alone and without technology, when in reality young people in rural America use technology and have friends. Images typically depict women at home, when in reality, women also work in agriculture and at other jobs.
The brand hired photographers to go out into rural communities to collect these images, which Land O’Lakes then published to Getty. This took about three months, with the collection launching in November.
Land O’Lakes is pleased with the results so far. In the first month, people have downloaded 200,000 images. The brand’s marketing campaign about it generated 41 million impressions.
This is an ongoing initiative, Malenshek said, and Land O’Lakes will continue to add images to the collection to ensure they still accurately represent the region.
Investment and Return on Investment
The Modern Rural Collective platform overall and the Getty Images project was a “minimal investment” that was a “tiny” portion of the overall marketing budget, Malenshek said. It is only a portion of the job for the marketers who are working on it, she said.
The return on the investment is around brand reputation, having more authentic representation of rural America in culture and sparking more conversations about it.
“It helps us with our influence and our profile, I would say externally as well, which has a halo effect on our business,” she said.
Even further down the line, if the media and entertainment industries depict America more accurately, it could spur more companies to invest in the rural communities or think about hiring talent from there.
“The goal of going into this was not about a big brand exercise for Land O’Lakes,” she said. “That’s why we called it the Modern Rural Collective, not the Land O’Lakes Collective. It was really about arming people with tools so that all boats rise as a result of this.”
In fact, if Land O’Lakes put its name on it, that restricts others from feeling ownership of the collective.
“We are not just about selling stuff; we’re actually supporting the communities who provide the milk for the butter and cheese that we make,” she said.
