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

Source: Hacker News

Overview

Hershey is revamping one of marketing’s oldest measurement tools—marketing mix modeling (MMM)—by enlisting agentic AI to turn a historically slow, backward‑looking process into something closer to real‑time.

The confectionery giant, home to brands like Reese’s and Skinny Pop, is working with the analytics platforms Mutinex and Tracer to automate MMM, a statistical technique that measures how media spending and other variables drive sales, making it faster and more frequent.

Mutinex, underpinned by Claude and Gemini, 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. “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.”

Tracer functions as the plumbing behind Hershey’s new MMM setup, cleaning and standardizing fragmented data across marketing and retail systems so Mutinex’s models can run faster and more reliably.

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

“Marketing 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,” said Lou Paskalis, market advisor at Mutinex.

What AI actually does

Mutinex has built what it describes as a multi‑agent system, where each agent acts as a domain specialist (e.g., marketing econometrics, competitive pricing theory, model‑failure diagnosis). By combining Tracer’s data‑cleaning capabilities with Mutinex’s AI system, Hershey can now run models in as little as three weeks, enabling faster iteration on how marketing spend is evaluated and adjusted.

“Most companies don’t have an AI problem. They have a data‑readiness problem,” said Sarah Martinez, chief commercial officer, Tracer.

Justifying media budget

Early signals suggest the shift could pay off. While Mutinex’s system is still rolling out, Hershey expects to increase revenue attributable to media by 4 %–5 %.

Hershey previously ran MMM analysis three times a year for about five brands, with results arriving months later. With Mutinex and Tracer, the company is moving toward measuring its entire brand portfolio on a monthly basis—up to 12 times a year.

“You take all of our trade dollars into account—anywhere from two‑plus billion dollars of investment going between media and trade marketing—you can now start to make decisions on a monthly basis,” Rinaldi said. “This is a complete game‑changing moment for our organization.”