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.
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.
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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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
https://static-www.adweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Her...
