{"id":18094,"date":"2026-04-27T09:24:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T09:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/18094\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T09:24:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T09:24:17","slug":"hershey-bets-on-ai-agents-to-fix-its-2-billion-marketing-blind-spot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/18094\/","title":{"rendered":"Hershey Bets on AI Agents to Fix Its $2 Billion Marketing Blind Spot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hershey is revamping one of marketing\u2019s oldest measurement tools\u2014marketing mix modeling\u2014by enlisting agentic AI <\/a>in a bid to turn what has historically been a slow, backward-looking process into something closer to real-time.<\/p>\n

The confectionery giant, home to brands like Reese\u2019s and Skinny Pop, is working with the analytics platforms Mutinex and Tracer to automate marketing mix modeling \u2014 a statistical technique that measures how media spending and other variables drive sales \u2014 making it faster and more frequent. <\/p>\n

Mutinex, underpinned by Claude<\/a> and Gemini<\/a>, now gives Hershey a faster, always-on MMM system that supports monthly decisions across media and trade spend. Previously the company ran manual analysis at much slower cycles, according to CEO Henry Innis. \u201cWe were getting the full read of 2024 [data] midway through 2025, while we were planning for 2026,\u201d said Vinny Rinaldi, vp of media and marketing technology at Hershey. \u201cThat alone is just not conducive to where marketers need to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracer functions as the plumbing behind Hershey\u2019s new MMM setup, cleaning and standardizing fragmented data across marketing and retail systems so Mutinex\u2019s models can run faster and more reliably.<\/p>\n

Hershey\u2019s move comes as CMOs look to bolster media measurement with AI amid growing fragmentation and tighter budgets. At the same time, agentic AI systems<\/a> are drawing increased attention<\/a> across the industry for their ability to automate parts of the marketing workflow, and potentially making marketing spend easier to evaluate as an investment rather than a cost.<\/p>\n

\u201cMarketing is not viewed as credible when it comes to investment. A lot of that has to do with skepticism around how attribution has been done historically,\u201d said Lou Paskalis, market advisor at Mutinex.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a> What AI actually does\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mutinex has built what it describes as a \u201cmulti-agent system,\u201d where each agent acts as a domain specialist. For example, one agent understands marketing econometrics, another understands competitive pricing theory, another diagnoses model failures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By combining Tracer, which cleans and makes sense of Hershey\u2019s data infrastructure, with Mutinex\u2019s AI system, Hershey is now able run models in as little as three weeks.<\/p>\n

In practice, that means faster iteration on how marketing spend is evaluated and adjusted, rather than waiting for lagging historical reads.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost companies don\u2019t have an AI problem. They have a data readiness problem,\u201d said Sarah Martinez, chief commercial officer, Tracer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"PubMatic<\/a> Justifying media budget\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Early signals suggest the shift could pay off. While Mutinex\u2019s system is still rolling out, Hershey expects to increase revenue attributable to media by 4% to 5%.<\/p>\n

Hershey typically ran MMM analysis three times a year for about five brands with results arriving months later. With Mutinex and Tracer, the company is now moving toward measuring its entire brand portfolio on a monthly basis\u2014up to 12 times a year.<\/p>\n

Whether that plays out at scale remains an open question. For Hershey, though, the shift is already influencing how it plans and allocates spend.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou take all of our trade dollars into account\u2014anywhere from two plus billion dollars of investment going between media and trade marketing\u2014you can now start to make decisions off of on a monthly basis,\u201d Rinaldi said. \u201cThis is a complete game-changing moment for our organization.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"On<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hershey is revamping one of marketing\u2019s oldest measurement tools\u2014marketing mix modeling\u2014by enlisting agentic AI in a bid to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12981,405,25,7537,1367],"class_list":{"0":"post-18094","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-advertising-news","9":"tag-ai-agents","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","12":"tag-exclusive"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}