While AI media-buying agents hog the attention, Hershey’s has been applying agentic tech to something less glamorous: media mix modeling.
According to Digiday, the confectioner worked with Mutinex and Tracer.tech and spent a year building a system of several AI agents to produce campaign media modeling in weeks rather than months. The goal is to speed up measurement reporting and media investment decisions, which is a less shiny sentence than “AI buys ads now,” but probably closer to where the budgets get moved.
Vinny Rinaldi, Hershey’s vp of consumer connections, frames the shift as “relevance over reach.” Not abandoning reach, exactly, but asking whose reach matters and whether it changed behavior. That measurement framework has already nudged spending into “unchartered” territory for the brand, most notably Reddit for Reese’s, where Rinaldi says Reddit has been “moving more units per dollar spent than any other channel.”
The system is also being used to guide how Hershey’s navigates the current TV upfront season, including scenarios like reallocating dollars from “old school cable” and forecasting the revenue impact.
On the machinery side, Hershey’s says it is testing planning agents — Rinaldi calls planning the overlooked half of the business — and has been building more automated buying capabilities for years. That includes customizing its bidding ecosystem via Chalice data and integrations across major DSPs, “mainly The Trade Desk,” plus YouTube and Meta.
The ownership question is where this gets more pointed. Hershey’s wants to own the agent because it is fueled by Hershey’s data. The agency operates in “our ecosystem,” as Rinaldi puts it, even as Publicis Groupe has handled Hershey’s U.S. media duties since 2024.
Rinaldi’s main caveat is less about whether agents work in the abstract and more about whether brands bothered to lay the “concrete foundation” of infrastructure first. An unsexy prerequisite, in his telling, but apparently important if the next storm is not going to turn the AI house into scattered candy wrappers.
Read more at Digiday.