21–30 of 57 posts
> “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.” 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…
Waste and grift.
Maybe they could have spent some of that money making chocolate that doesn't taste like vomit.
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.
> “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.” 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…
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 l…
> “Most companies don’t have an AI problem. They have a data readiness problem,” said Sarah Martinez, chief commercial officer, Tracer. 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.
> “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.” 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…
Wait, does their logo actually end with a picture of a pile of poop, complete with gray stink lines and everything?? Amazing... https://static-www.adweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Her...
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 l…
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.
Wait, does their logo actually end with a picture of a pile of poop, complete with gray stink lines and everything?? Amazing... https://static-www.adweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Her...