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

There is the old quote:

"Half of my advertising useless. The only problem is that I don't know which half."

That was certainly true in the newspaper and radio days when attribution wsa difficult (although you could argue coupon codes etc helped.) Today, however, every online ad id attributable to a sale.

That makes me question:

1. Why do they keep spending money on things that don't work?

2. Why do they spend money on things they can't track?

I don't know the answer to #1 but folks I know who work in radio sales say that #2 happens b/c certain demographics are essentially not reachable by desktop web ads or even mobile. That's why they target radio.

> But characterizing it as tasting like “vomit” … is spin.

It really isn’t spin- It’s a common perception for people who aren’t accustomed to it. Search for “Hersheys chocolate tastes like vomit” and as a control, search for some other brand of chocolate tastes like vomit (I did lindt but you could use anything I’m sure). All the hits I got on the lindt search were references to hersheys tasting like vomit. On the hersheys search I got (for example)

https://cookingsmoke.com/why-does-hersheys-chocolate-smell-l...

https://enersection.io/why-does-hersheys-taste-like-vomit

https://decorwithstyle.com/does-hersheys-chocolate-have-vomi... (“Debunking the Myths: Does Hershey’s Chocolate Contain Vomit?”)

https://www.chefsresource.com/why-does-hershey-taste-like-vo...

A reddit thread “Does Hershey's taste like vomit, or are all Europeans snobs?” (Which, why not both?)

…etc etc lots of similar hits all for the same sort of thing.

Now for calibration I didn’t grow up with fancy European chocolate. I grew up in Africa with bloody horrible chocolate but even so I was genuinely shocked and disgusted the first time I tasted Hersheys. I had expected something, well… something that didn’t taste like vomit.

Versus the first time I had, say Lindt or Godiva or Leonidas or Guylian chocolate I was surprised and delighted by how much better it tasted than the chocolate that I had grown up with.

I get this is 100% a question of cultural norms and acquired taste, but to say it’s spin is definitely not true.

take 1 billion and improve everything but your flagship product. Then take that other billion, and improve your flagship product.

Mention on twitter you spent 2 billion on scientists instead of marketing, so hey try our new chocolate.

I remember meeting a founder who had a moderately successful adtech business who was venting about the difficulty getting very large brands with huge spend on board. This is probably almost 2 decades ago now before what many of us take for granted in terms of analytics, so direct attribution between spend and return wasn't particularly common.

He was having great success with small and mid-tier companies, then he'd run a pilot with a massive global brand and the results would be even more stark than what he'd see with his existing users. But basically could not close a deal.

Because of exactly what you've shared here: "they measured on how much the spend, not on how much they bring in. Because they've never been able to do that. Their job is so much easier if nobody can ever see that latter figure they just go year to year asking for more budget and the more they spend the more everyone thinks they're doing a great job". I was naive enough at the time to think he was wrong and that couldn't possibly be true. But I've seen enough in the years since to realise he was right.