Hershey Cuts Marketing Analysis Time to 3 Weeks with AI Platform

Marketing has always had a timing problem. You spend the money, run the campaign, then wait months to find out whether it worked. By the time the data arrives, you're already planning the next cycle. The insight is ancient history.

Hershey just announced a move that directly tackles this gap. The confectionery giant, home to Reese's and Skinny Pop, has partnered with analytics platforms Mutinex and Tracer to automate its marketing measurement process. The result: analysis that once took multiple months now takes three weeks.

Measurement Delay Was Costing Hershey Real Money

Hershey manages over US$2 billion in media and trade spending annually. That's a number most companies in Asia won't match, but the underlying problem is universal.

The company previously ran its marketing mix modeling (a method for measuring how different spending decisions drive actual sales) three times a year. Results arrived months after the fact. As Vinny Rinaldi, VP of Media and Marketing Technology at Hershey, put it plainly: "We were getting the full read of 2024 [data] midway through 2025, while we were planning for 2026. That alone is just not conducive to where marketers need to be."

Hershey is now moving toward monthly analysis across its entire brand portfolio. That's a jump from three reads per year to up to 12. The change isn't cosmetic. It means budget allocation decisions based on what's actually working right now, not what worked six months ago.

How Two Platforms Cut the Timeline

The speed comes from two things working together. Mutinex built a multi-agent AI system, where separate AI agents each handle a specialized task. One focuses on marketing economics, another on competitive pricing, a third diagnoses when models are producing unreliable results. Think of it as a team of specialists rather than one generalist tool.

But Mutinex alone doesn't explain the speed. The other piece is Tracer, which handles data infrastructure. Tracer cleans and standardizes Hershey's fragmented data across marketing and retail systems before the models even run. That preparation step is often what makes AI deployments slow or unreliable.

"Most companies don't have an AI problem," said Sarah Martinez, Chief Commercial Officer at Tracer. "They have a data readiness problem."

This distinction matters for APAC marketing leaders. The AI tools are available. The real constraint is usually whether your data is clean enough to feed them. Getting that data layer right is the prerequisite, not the afterthought.

Monthly Data Gives Marketing a CFO-Legible Number

There's a longer-running problem underneath the speed question. Marketing has struggled to prove its value in terms finance teams can evaluate. Lou Paskalis, senior advisor at Mutinex, identified it directly: "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."

Faster measurement isn't just operationally useful. It's a credibility move. When a CMO can show monthly data linking spend to revenue, the conversation with finance changes. Hershey expects a 4-5% increase in revenue attributable to media as a result of this shift. That's the kind of number a CFO will track.

APAC Data Shows the Platform Works Outside the US

Hershey's deployment is US-focused, but the same Mutinex platform is already producing results in this region. An Australian mortgage lender shifted 20% of its search spend using Mutinex's AI and achieved a 40% ROI gain within three months.

Gartner projects 60% of brands will use agentic AI for streamlined customer interactions by 2028. Only 23% of organizations have started scaling it in any business function. The gap between where the industry is headed and where most teams currently sit is still wide.

For marketing leaders across Southeast Asia managing fragmented, multi-market data environments, the Hershey case offers a concrete model. The technology is available. The bottleneck is data readiness. And the business case for fixing it runs directly through the CFO's office.