Hershey Bets on Agentic AI to Rethink $2B in Marketing Spend
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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?
FTA:
> The confectionery giant, home to brands like Reese’s and Skinny Pop, is working with the analytics platforms Mutinex and Tracer to automate marketing mix modeling — a statistical technique that measures how media spending and other variables drive sales — making it faster and more frequent.
So this system doesn't cost $2bn, it goes into the decision-making of where to spend the $2bn.
I agree that when you have a $2bn budget, it's hard to fathom tolerating a 6-mo analytics lead time, but I'm sure it's not alone, and I'm sure that's why this vendor lobbied Ad Age to cover this project.
Ultimately I am highly skeptical. Ad tech is almost always a repackaging of the same product with a new name. They may be using AI to help analyze the data, but I doubt it really has any kind of sizable impact.
> LEVITT: And they said to me "[...] One time we hired this summer intern and his job was to do the newspaper inserts for Pittsburgh, and the guy was so incompetent that he just didn’t do it. And when the C.E.O. found that out, he said, ‘If you ever do that again, you’re all fired.’
> LEVITT: So, I said to them, “Well, O.K. But when you looked at the results, what happened to the sales in Pittsburgh when you were dark for a month?” And they called me back about a week later and they said, “You’re not going to believe it. We looked at the data in Pittsburgh, and we saw no impact on sales when they didn’t do any inserts for a month.” I said, “Oh, my God, that’s amazing! O.K., so when can we get started?”
> LEVITT: They said, “Are you crazy?” It was almost if they found out they didn’t work, it was far worse for these people than it was not finding out it didn’t work. Because then they had to explain why for the last 15 years they had been wasting $200 million a year. So, they were happy to just live in a world in which as long as there were ads in every market, every Sunday, life was good.
[1]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/He was having great success with small and mid-tier companies, then he'd run a pilot with a massive global brand and the results would be even more stark than what he'd see with his existing users. But basically could not close a deal.
Because of exactly what you've shared here: "they measured on how much the spend, not on how much they bring in. Because they've never been able to do that. Their job is so much easier if nobody can ever see that latter figure they just go year to year asking for more budget and the more they spend the more everyone thinks they're doing a great job". I was naive enough at the time to think he was wrong and that couldn't possibly be true. But I've seen enough in the years since to realise he was right.
"Half of my advertising useless. The only problem is that I don't know which half."
That was certainly true in the newspaper and radio days when attribution wsa difficult (although you could argue coupon codes etc helped.) Today, however, every online ad id attributable to a sale.
That makes me question:
1. Why do they keep spending money on things that don't work?
2. Why do they spend money on things they can't track?
I don't know the answer to #1 but folks I know who work in radio sales say that #2 happens b/c certain demographics are essentially not reachable by desktop web ads or even mobile. That's why they target radio.
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.
And this happens with a natural language interface, instead of Excel (although people of course still want an export to Excel button) or worse: by having to go to the BI analyst, have them change a dashboard and after waiting for a few weeks hope they give you what you want...
Yes, you need to structure your data well. Especially metadata/defintions and accessibility - which is not cleaning up ETL pipelines, although that will help. And obviously have lots of relevant data available already (which was my job before this).
From my experience: fully automated marketing budget allocation... Doubt it. Time to insight reduced >10x? For sure.
This could be anything from "we put a prompt in front of chat-gpt that says 'you are an expert in marketing econometrics'" to "we built a model trained exclusively on marketing econometrics material"
No matter what they actually did, the agent (assuming its an LLM) doesn't understand marketing econometrics, instead it's tuned to produce output tokens that I suppose make more sense when the topic is marketing econometrics.
I'm not an LLM detractor, but I find the kind of thinking that's become prevalent to be so squishy. Humans are great anthropomorphizers and it seems today that no one is attempting to hit the brakes on that instinct. The models don't understand anything, in the way that we commonly use the term understand.
It seems we've confused ourselves because the box that doesn't understand marketing econometrics can produce marketing econometrics analysis and when we ask it why it came to such and such conclusion it can produce convincing explanations.
As an aside, I also feel like I've heard this for 30 years about marketing. Marketing is everywhere, the surveillance economy tracks our every move in more and more invasive ways every day, and still companies go "Aw shucks, we just can't make sense of this data." It reminds me of a time when I was working for Abercrombie and Fitch and there was this massive report our team was partially responsible for generating. 500+ pages, generated everyday, sent to a high speed printer from a COBOL job every morning at 5am so that 10-15 copies could be made for the executives. It had *all the data* and each executive had their own little ritual around which bits they thought were important.
Throughout my career as an engineer I've been asked to get more data, more data, more data. Process the data, analyze the data, create some graphs and tables and help people understand the data.
One thing I've realized is that the people demanding all this data, all this insight, all this analysis, are unlikely to actually need it or use it when available. They are tasked with making decisions, and decisions are scary because you can make the wrong one. They would love to not make the decision and maybe you can find enough data that the choices get cut down to just one. Then if it ends up wrong they aren't to blame, the data made them make that decision.
So all of this surveillance, all of this analysis, all of this data is likely just to make some person feel a bit more comfortable about making a decision.
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.
The relevant text from Hershey's latest 10-K (amounts in thousand):
Selling, marketing and administrative expense (“SM&A”) represents costs incurred in generating revenues and in managing our business. Such costs include advertising and other marketing expenses, selling expenses, research and development costs, administrative and other indirect overhead costs, amortization of capitalized software and intangible assets and depreciation of administrative facilities. Research and development costs, charged to expense as incurred, totaled $61,655 in 2025, $55,798 in 2024 and $50,030 in 2023. Advertising expense is also charged to expense as incurred and totaled $611,951 in 2025, $600,094 in 2024 and $604,853 in 2023. There was no prepaid advertising expense as of December 31, 2025. Prepaid advertising expense was $1,351 as of December 31, 2024.
1. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/47111/00016282802600...
General awareness campaigns are not in vogue these days, especially for CPG companies. You're not seeing a lot of billboards or train wraps for these brands anymore. Instead, you're probably just not deemed by the all-knowing models to be a likely buyer (count yourself lucky--it's probably a good sign for your diet and health).
But it's not inconceivable at all that the $2B spend it invisible to a high portion or even a large majority of the population if they can get more ROAS by targeting specific subsets.
Edit: one more ps that I thought was funny. The one brand you called out (Kit Kat) is only owned by Hershey in the US so it's entirely possible that the online ads you've seen are actually Nestlé's, depending on what sites you're viewing and/or where you live.
This is crazy to me because I would never use Hershey's for cooking.
Hershey's is the childhood candy. Enjoyable for nostalgia only, while also being fairly cheap compared to good chocolate.
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.
Isn't that what they were doing before AI anyways? It's natural, then.
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.
Zero disagreement on Hershey. It got a lot worse since my childhood days.
https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/shrinkflation-the-brand...
So folks aren’t wrong when they say it tastes like the chocolate is spoiled/off. They’re tasting heavily processed milk.
For people who did not grow up with hershey's, the butyric acid is what makes it taste off.
This is not a question of safety - it is a question of results. They stayed with old technologies and have optimized for cost, not flavor. (And yes, that processing was necessary in the days before a reliable milk source.)
If you grew up with European chocolate the unfamiliarity maybe makes it taste off. But characterizing it as tasting like “vomit” and the result of over “processing” is spin. Butyric acid arises from processing milk products, which is why the compound is in Hershey’s chocolate and also in parmesan cheese. The opposite marketing spin: “Hershey’s chocolate bars use traditional techniques that result in a hint of parmesan with the sweet” would be equally correct.
It really isn’t spin- It’s a common perception for people who aren’t accustomed to it. Search for “Hersheys chocolate tastes like vomit” and as a control, search for some other brand of chocolate tastes like vomit (I did lindt but you could use anything I’m sure). All the hits I got on the lindt search were references to hersheys tasting like vomit. On the hersheys search I got (for example)
https://cookingsmoke.com/why-does-hersheys-chocolate-smell-l...
https://enersection.io/why-does-hersheys-taste-like-vomit
https://decorwithstyle.com/does-hersheys-chocolate-have-vomi... (“Debunking the Myths: Does Hershey’s Chocolate Contain Vomit?”)
https://www.chefsresource.com/why-does-hershey-taste-like-vo...
A reddit thread “Does Hershey's taste like vomit, or are all Europeans snobs?” (Which, why not both?)
…etc etc lots of similar hits all for the same sort of thing.
Now for calibration I didn’t grow up with fancy European chocolate. I grew up in Africa with bloody horrible chocolate but even so I was genuinely shocked and disgusted the first time I tasted Hersheys. I had expected something, well… something that didn’t taste like vomit.
Versus the first time I had, say Lindt or Godiva or Leonidas or Guylian chocolate I was surprised and delighted by how much better it tasted than the chocolate that I had grown up with.
I get this is 100% a question of cultural norms and acquired taste, but to say it’s spin is definitely not true.
"Our Kisses are all you need to send in this pandemic"
All they need to discover is some edge case and take it to the moon. That's how you move shit product.
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.
By now they should know their place is more "corporate candy bowl" or "look, my date for the night is here" where people about the dopamine pop and fun-chatter.
Mention on twitter you spent 2 billion on scientists instead of marketing, so hey try our new chocolate.
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.
It sounds like you got fired and offered severance.
https://static-www.adweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Her...