Hershey Bets on Agentic AI to Rethink $2B in Marketing Spend

chuckadams

Maybe they could have spent some of that money making chocolate that doesn't taste like vomit.

steveBK123

They should have just listened to Don Drapers pitch

cmiles8

They would get a lot more ROI by just investing in making products that don’t taste like shit. Note that some of their products have been enshitified so much that they can’t even legally be called chocolate in some jurisdictions. It’s cheap filler designed to simulate chocolate. Agentic AI is not going to solve that.

kotaKat

> “Most companies don’t have an AI problem. They have a data readiness problem,” said Sarah Martinez, chief commercial officer, Tracer. She's right. Companies are too afraid to face the real data from their customers, so they need to hallucinate the data they wanted to imagine instead.

krapht

<article excerpt> What AI actually does Mutinex has built what it describes as a “multi-agent system,” where each agent acts as a domain specialist. For example, one agent understands marketing econometrics, another understands competitive pricing theory, another diagnoses model failures. By combining Tracer, which cleans and makes sense of Hershey’s data infrastructure, with Mutinex’s AI system, Hershey is now able run models in as little as three weeks. In practice, that means faster iteration on how marketing spend is evaluated and adjusted, rather than waiting for lagging historical reads. “Most companies don’t have an AI problem. They have a data readiness problem,” said Sarah Martinez, chief commercial officer, Tracer. </article excerpt> Instead of the headline, it sounds like they've hired an external company to clean up their ETL pipelines. That seems useful. I'm going to doubt spooling up <massive LLM> with <appropriate system prompt> is going to be the thing that reduces their analysis time.

kleiba2

Wait, does their logo actually end with a picture of a pile of poop, complete with gray stink lines and everything?? Amazing... https://static-www.adweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Her...

OtherShrezzing

> “We were getting the full read of 2024 [data] midway through 2025, while we were planning for 2026,” said Vinny Rinaldi, vp of media and marketing technology at Hershey. “That alone is just not conducive to where marketers need to be.” Irrespective of AI, it's astounding that companies have been throwing $2bn/yr at marketing, and their analytics data on that spend is delayed 6-18 months. That's nearly 15% of their annual revenues spent on guesswork. What's been going on over at Hersheys?

dtagames

The truth is that no one can tell why someone bought a Hershey bar. There's no way to distinguish childhood nostalgia from price competitiveness, developed habits, local availability, etc. It's all just guessing*. The entire ad business lives from this guessing process, so now they can have AI do the guessing. *Source: I was employed briefly at a company in this space that works with popular brands. They offered me cash to go away when I started sniffing out the underlying BS of how it worked.

lacewing

I'm amazed that Hershey is spending $2B on marketing. I honestly don't think I've seen any advertising for the brand itself at any point in the past decade, and I don't have any positive association with it: it's the "bad" chocolate you buy for cooking? Looking at their subsidiary brands, I don't think I've seen any serious advertising for them either. KitKat is doing viral marketing on social media, but surely, that's not $2B... I've never seen anything for Twizzlers, Pirate's Booty, Milk Duds, Whoppers... the only reason I know these brands is that they're on the shelf in my grocery store. Unless I'm an outlier, I think it's smart of them to stop throwing $2B down whatever hole they're throwing it into right now.

fuckinpuppers

I’m always confused why some companies have to advertise so much. Some companies like Kleenex or Band-aid… they’re synonymous with the product. Hershey is very well known for chocolate and probably many other products under their umbrella. The only marketing you really need is if you see some concerning dips in sales due to competition, or to push a new product. Instead of spending billions on marketing, keep your prices low and competitive, don’t cut corners on quality. I’m tired of companies cutting costs to maximize profits but still marketing to consumers all the same while degrading the products.

genewitch

take 1 billion and improve everything but your flagship product. Then take that other billion, and improve your flagship product. Mention on twitter you spent 2 billion on scientists instead of marketing, so hey try our new chocolate .