Hershey Bets on AI Agents to Fix Its $2 Billion Marketing Blind Spot

Hershey is revamping one among advertising’s oldest measurement instruments—advertising combine modeling—by enlisting agentic AI in a bid to show what has traditionally been a sluggish, backward-looking course of into one thing nearer to real-time.

The confectionery large, house to manufacturers like Reese’s and Skinny Pop, is working with the analytics platforms Mutinex and Tracer to automate advertising combine modeling — a statistical method that measures how media spending and different variables drive gross sales — making it quicker and extra frequent.

Mutinex, underpinned by Claude and Gemini, now provides Hershey a quicker, always-on MMM system that helps month-to-month choices throughout media and commerce spend. Beforehand the corporate ran handbook evaluation at a lot slower cycles, in keeping with CEO Henry Innis. “We had been getting the complete learn of 2024 [data] halfway by means of 2025, whereas we had been planning for 2026,” mentioned Vinny Rinaldi, vp of media and advertising know-how at Hershey. “That alone is simply not conducive to the place entrepreneurs have to be.”

Tracer features because the plumbing behind Hershey’s new MMM setup, cleansing and standardizing fragmented knowledge throughout advertising and retail methods so Mutinex’s fashions can run quicker and extra reliably.

Hershey’s transfer comes as CMOs look to bolster media measurement with AI amid rising fragmentation and tighter budgets. On the identical time, agentic AI systems are drawing elevated attention throughout the trade for his or her capability to automate components of the advertising workflow, and doubtlessly making advertising spend simpler to guage as an funding quite than a value.

“Advertising is just not seen as credible in the case of funding. A variety of that has to do with skepticism round how attribution has been carried out traditionally,” mentioned Lou Paskalis, market advisor at Mutinex.