4 ms·

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

27 points by mooreds 6mo ago

chuckadams 6mo ago
Maybe they could have spent some of that money making chocolate that doesn't taste like vomit.
- ubercore 6mo ago
  They could, easily, but then it wouldn't taste like Hershey's chocolate and people don't like that.
- Simulacra 6mo ago
  I think that's the core issue, they are using this technology to invest in making chocolate as a business, cheap and unfulfilling as possible.
- coro_1 6mo ago
  Their products are probably not cherished for any genuine candy-chocolate delicacy across all channels. 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.
steveBK123 6mo ago
They should have just listened to Don Drapers pitch
cmiles8 6mo ago
They would get a lot more ROI by just investing in making products that don’t taste like shit. 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.
- arealaccount 6mo ago
  Not with that attitude
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
  Well, F just got a boost for an analyst noticing that have a connection to AI based on their batteries and boom.. AI pivot. All of it makes me super nervous about the market. Zero disagreement on Hershey. It got a lot worse since my childhood days.
  - cmiles8 6mo ago
    Yes, it’s a product of the typical game of gradually swapping out expensive ingredients for less expensive ones and hoping folks don’t notice the gradual change. Over time the product ends up being nothing like what it once was.
    - seanhunter 6mo ago
      This is an example of the same sort of phenomenon as shrinkflation, which they seem to have dubbed "skimpflation"[1] in this article although I've never heard that term used before. https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/shrinkflation-the-brands-charging-you-more-for-less-atUkT4m2GjuP https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/shrinkflation-the-brand...
      - cmiles8 6mo ago
        The technical term is “enshitification.” Gradually making a product worse to squeeze out more profit.
- seanhunter 6mo ago
  That is it. I heard a possible urban legend that the reason Heshey tastes like that is back in the olden times before the internet they also didn't have refrigerated transport for dairy produce so the milk would go slightly sour when it was transported from the farm to the chocolate factory. This led to the "distinctive"/vomit-like taste of their chocolate and they decided to artificially sour the milk to stick with that flavour even after refrigerated dairy trucks were invented (for some reason).
kotaKat 6mo ago
> “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.
- rirze 6mo ago
  > 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.
krapht 6mo ago
<article excerpt> 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. </article excerpt> 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.
- soco 6mo ago
  Didn't we run into the same wall with the data lakes? When was that hype... 201x something?
- jochem9 6mo ago
  I am working with agentic AI on industrial manufacturing data. The speed at which you can get insights and dig into all kinds of rabbit holes is insane. It's just as easy to compare plants so you can make strategic decisions on budget allocation as it is to do root cause analysis on why during a given shift there were so many breakdowns. 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.
- ihumanable 6mo ago
  I know that articles like this, and the broader dialog, doesn't go too in-depth on how these things work. The phrase, "one agent understand marketing econometrics" from the article makes me wonder what exactly they mean. This could be anything from "we put a prompt in front of chat-gpt that says 'you are an expert in marketing econometrics'" to "we built a model trained exclusively on marketing econometrics material" No matter what they actually did, the agent (assuming its an LLM) doesn't understand marketing econometrics, instead it's tuned to produce output tokens that I suppose make more sense when the topic is marketing econometrics. I'm not an LLM detractor, but I find the kind of thinking that's become prevalent to be so squishy. Humans are great anthropomorphizers and it seems today that no one is attempting to hit the brakes on that instinct. The models don't understand anything, in the way that we commonly use the term understand. It seems we've confused ourselves because the box that doesn't understand marketing econometrics can produce marketing econometrics analysis and when we ask it why it came to such and such conclusion it can produce convincing explanations. As an aside, I also feel like I've heard this for 30 years about marketing. Marketing is everywhere, the surveillance economy tracks our every move in more and more invasive ways every day, and still companies go "Aw shucks, we just can't make sense of this data." It reminds me of a time when I was working for Abercrombie and Fitch and there was this massive report our team was partially responsible for generating. 500+ pages, generated everyday, sent to a high speed printer from a COBOL job every morning at 5am so that 10-15 copies could be made for the executives. It had *all the data* and each executive had their own little ritual around which bits they thought were important. Throughout my career as an engineer I've been asked to get more data, more data, more data. Process the data, analyze the data, create some graphs and tables and help people understand the data. One thing I've realized is that the people demanding all this data, all this insight, all this analysis, are unlikely to actually need it or use it when available. They are tasked with making decisions, and decisions are scary because you can make the wrong one. They would love to not make the decision and maybe you can find enough data that the choices get cut down to just one. Then if it ends up wrong they aren't to blame, the data made them make that decision. So all of this surveillance, all of this analysis, all of this data is likely just to make some person feel a bit more comfortable about making a decision.
kleiba2 6mo ago
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/Hershey_Logo_2Color.png?w=1240 https://static-www.adweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Her...
- Merad 6mo ago
  Not 100% sure if you're serious, but it's a piece of Hershey Kisses candy which predates the existence of emojis by at least a century.
  - kleiba2 6mo ago
    Not serious ;-)
- SAI_Peregrinus 6mo ago
  It's meant to be one of their "kiss" chocolate-flavored candies with the long paper tag sticking out the top.
OtherShrezzing 6mo ago
> “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 annual revenues spent on guesswork. What's been going on over at Hersheys?
- nathanaldensr 6mo ago
  Waste and grift.
  - Lionga 6mo ago
    To be replaced by AI, waste and grift.
- morley 6mo ago
  $2bn is their entire marketing spend, so it includes media buying, creative, in-store displays, PR, research, and anything else involved in the marketing mix. 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.
- xnx 6mo ago
  Companies waste 80% of their marketing spend. They just don't know which 80%.
- etempleton 6mo ago
  My guess is they have to wait to measure the downstream impact of their marketing. And marketing attribution is notoriously fuzzy. If a tv ad runs on may 1 what is the attribution window to someone buying a Hershey bar? How do you know they saw the ad? And that the ad influenced their purchase behavior? The answer is you really don’t do you come up with some kind of formula based a few assumptions. Ultimately I am highly skeptical. Ad tech is almost always a repackaging of the same product with a new name. They may be using AI to help analyze the data, but I doubt it really has any kind of sizable impact.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
dtagames 6mo ago
The truth is that no one can tell why someone bought a Hershey bar. There's no way to distinguish childhood nostalgia from price competitiveness, developed habits, local availability, etc. It's all just guessing*. The entire ad business lives from this guessing process, so now they can have AI do the guessing. *Source: I was employed briefly at a company in this space that works with popular brands. They offered me cash to go away when I started sniffing out the underlying BS of how it worked.
- bpodgursky 6mo ago
  > They offered me cash to go away It sounds like you got fired and offered severance.
  - dtagames 6mo ago
    It wasn't my intent to discover or disclose anything. It was quite accidental. The company's desire to prevent my discoveries from being disclosed resulted in a NDA and settlement offer before I even had a chance to understand what I'd found out. I honor the signed agreement not because I like what's going on in the business, but because I took the cash and I don't like lawsuits.
- etempleton 6mo ago
  People like to claim you can measure advertising and marketing directly and for most products and services that is just not true. But executives think it must be true and so demand it and so they end up hiring / going with the best liar.
lacewing 6mo ago
I'm amazed that Hershey is spending $2B on marketing. I honestly don't think I've seen any advertising for the brand itself at any point in the past decade, and I don't have any positive association with it: it's the "bad" chocolate you buy for cooking? Looking at their subsidiary brands, I don't think I've seen any serious advertising for them either. KitKat is doing viral marketing on social media, but surely, that's not $2B... I've never seen anything for Twizzlers, Pirate's Booty, Milk Duds, Whoppers... the only reason I know these brands is that they're on the shelf in my grocery store. Unless I'm an outlier, I think it's smart of them to stop throwing $2B down whatever hole they're throwing it into right now.
- asah 6mo ago
  This probably includes "tradespend" - marketing dollars spent on retails and distributors to incentivize premier placement in retail/grocery channels.
- malshe 6mo ago
  Advertising is a subset of marketing so $2 billion is not all advertising. They probably do a lot of downstream supply chain promotions.
  - lacewing 6mo ago
    I understand that there's more to it than TV ads, but Coca-Cola reportedly spends only about 2x as much, and... you'd agree that they get a lot more bang for the buck in terms of selling the brand?
    - malshe 6mo ago
      That's not correct. According to Coca Cola Inc's latest 10-K, the advertising expense for 2025 fiscal year was $5.4 billion. In contrast, Hershey's ad expense was $612 million [1]. That's about 11% of Coke's ad expense. The relevant text from Hershey's latest 10-K (amounts in thousand): Selling, marketing and administrative expense (“SM&A”) represents costs incurred in generating revenues and in managing our business. Such costs include advertising and other marketing expenses, selling expenses, research and development costs, administrative and other indirect overhead costs, amortization of capitalized software and intangible assets and depreciation of administrative facilities. Research and development costs, charged to expense as incurred, totaled $61,655 in 2025, $55,798 in 2024 and $50,030 in 2023. Advertising expense is also charged to expense as incurred and totaled $611,951 in 2025, $600,094 in 2024 and $604,853 in 2023. There was no prepaid advertising expense as of December 31, 2025. Prepaid advertising expense was $1,351 as of December 31, 2024. 1. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/47111/000162828026008586/hsy-20251231.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/47111/00016282802600...
fuckinpuppers 6mo ago
I’m always confused why some companies have to advertise so much. Some companies like Kleenex or Band-aid… they’re synonymous with the product. Hershey is very well known for chocolate and probably many other products under their umbrella. The only marketing you really need is if you see some concerning dips in sales due to competition, or to push a new product. Instead of spending billions on marketing, keep your prices low and competitive, don’t cut corners on quality. I’m tired of companies cutting costs to maximize profits but still marketing to consumers all the same while degrading the products.
genewitch 6mo ago
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.

27 points by mooreds 6mo ago

chuckadams 6mo ago

Maybe they could have spent some of that money making chocolate that doesn't taste like vomit.

ubercore 6mo ago
They could, easily, but then it wouldn't taste like Hershey's chocolate and people don't like that.
Simulacra 6mo ago
I think that's the core issue, they are using this technology to invest in making chocolate as a business, cheap and unfulfilling as possible.
coro_1 6mo ago
Their products are probably not cherished for any genuine candy-chocolate delicacy across all channels. 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.

steveBK123 6mo ago

They should have just listened to Don Drapers pitch

cmiles8 6mo ago

They would get a lot more ROI by just investing in making products that don’t taste like shit. 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.

arealaccount 6mo ago
Not with that attitude
iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
Well, F just got a boost for an analyst noticing that have a connection to AI based on their batteries and boom.. AI pivot. All of it makes me super nervous about the market. Zero disagreement on Hershey. It got a lot worse since my childhood days.
- cmiles8 6mo ago
  Yes, it’s a product of the typical game of gradually swapping out expensive ingredients for less expensive ones and hoping folks don’t notice the gradual change. Over time the product ends up being nothing like what it once was.
  - seanhunter 6mo ago
    This is an example of the same sort of phenomenon as shrinkflation, which they seem to have dubbed "skimpflation"[1] in this article although I've never heard that term used before. https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/shrinkflation-the-brands-charging-you-more-for-less-atUkT4m2GjuP https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/shrinkflation-the-brand...
    - cmiles8 6mo ago
      The technical term is “enshitification.” Gradually making a product worse to squeeze out more profit.
seanhunter 6mo ago
That is it. I heard a possible urban legend that the reason Heshey tastes like that is back in the olden times before the internet they also didn't have refrigerated transport for dairy produce so the milk would go slightly sour when it was transported from the farm to the chocolate factory. This led to the "distinctive"/vomit-like taste of their chocolate and they decided to artificially sour the milk to stick with that flavour even after refrigerated dairy trucks were invented (for some reason).

kotaKat 6mo ago

> “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.

rirze 6mo ago
> 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.

krapht 6mo ago

<article excerpt> 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. </article excerpt> 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.

soco 6mo ago
Didn't we run into the same wall with the data lakes? When was that hype... 201x something?
jochem9 6mo ago
I am working with agentic AI on industrial manufacturing data. The speed at which you can get insights and dig into all kinds of rabbit holes is insane. It's just as easy to compare plants so you can make strategic decisions on budget allocation as it is to do root cause analysis on why during a given shift there were so many breakdowns. 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.
ihumanable 6mo ago
I know that articles like this, and the broader dialog, doesn't go too in-depth on how these things work. The phrase, "one agent understand marketing econometrics" from the article makes me wonder what exactly they mean. This could be anything from "we put a prompt in front of chat-gpt that says 'you are an expert in marketing econometrics'" to "we built a model trained exclusively on marketing econometrics material" No matter what they actually did, the agent (assuming its an LLM) doesn't understand marketing econometrics, instead it's tuned to produce output tokens that I suppose make more sense when the topic is marketing econometrics. I'm not an LLM detractor, but I find the kind of thinking that's become prevalent to be so squishy. Humans are great anthropomorphizers and it seems today that no one is attempting to hit the brakes on that instinct. The models don't understand anything, in the way that we commonly use the term understand. It seems we've confused ourselves because the box that doesn't understand marketing econometrics can produce marketing econometrics analysis and when we ask it why it came to such and such conclusion it can produce convincing explanations. As an aside, I also feel like I've heard this for 30 years about marketing. Marketing is everywhere, the surveillance economy tracks our every move in more and more invasive ways every day, and still companies go "Aw shucks, we just can't make sense of this data." It reminds me of a time when I was working for Abercrombie and Fitch and there was this massive report our team was partially responsible for generating. 500+ pages, generated everyday, sent to a high speed printer from a COBOL job every morning at 5am so that 10-15 copies could be made for the executives. It had *all the data* and each executive had their own little ritual around which bits they thought were important. Throughout my career as an engineer I've been asked to get more data, more data, more data. Process the data, analyze the data, create some graphs and tables and help people understand the data. One thing I've realized is that the people demanding all this data, all this insight, all this analysis, are unlikely to actually need it or use it when available. They are tasked with making decisions, and decisions are scary because you can make the wrong one. They would love to not make the decision and maybe you can find enough data that the choices get cut down to just one. Then if it ends up wrong they aren't to blame, the data made them make that decision. So all of this surveillance, all of this analysis, all of this data is likely just to make some person feel a bit more comfortable about making a decision.

kleiba2 6mo ago

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/Hershey_Logo_2Color.png?w=1240 https://static-www.adweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Her...

Merad 6mo ago
Not 100% sure if you're serious, but it's a piece of Hershey Kisses candy which predates the existence of emojis by at least a century.
- kleiba2 6mo ago
  Not serious ;-)
SAI_Peregrinus 6mo ago
It's meant to be one of their "kiss" chocolate-flavored candies with the long paper tag sticking out the top.

OtherShrezzing 6mo ago

> “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 annual revenues spent on guesswork. What's been going on over at Hersheys?

nathanaldensr 6mo ago
Waste and grift.
- Lionga 6mo ago
  To be replaced by AI, waste and grift.
morley 6mo ago
$2bn is their entire marketing spend, so it includes media buying, creative, in-store displays, PR, research, and anything else involved in the marketing mix. 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.
xnx 6mo ago
Companies waste 80% of their marketing spend. They just don't know which 80%.
etempleton 6mo ago
My guess is they have to wait to measure the downstream impact of their marketing. And marketing attribution is notoriously fuzzy. If a tv ad runs on may 1 what is the attribution window to someone buying a Hershey bar? How do you know they saw the ad? And that the ad influenced their purchase behavior? The answer is you really don’t do you come up with some kind of formula based a few assumptions. Ultimately I am highly skeptical. Ad tech is almost always a repackaging of the same product with a new name. They may be using AI to help analyze the data, but I doubt it really has any kind of sizable impact.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

dtagames 6mo ago

The truth is that no one can tell why someone bought a Hershey bar. There's no way to distinguish childhood nostalgia from price competitiveness, developed habits, local availability, etc. It's all just guessing*. The entire ad business lives from this guessing process, so now they can have AI do the guessing. *Source: I was employed briefly at a company in this space that works with popular brands. They offered me cash to go away when I started sniffing out the underlying BS of how it worked.

bpodgursky 6mo ago
> They offered me cash to go away It sounds like you got fired and offered severance.
- dtagames 6mo ago
  It wasn't my intent to discover or disclose anything. It was quite accidental. The company's desire to prevent my discoveries from being disclosed resulted in a NDA and settlement offer before I even had a chance to understand what I'd found out. I honor the signed agreement not because I like what's going on in the business, but because I took the cash and I don't like lawsuits.
etempleton 6mo ago
People like to claim you can measure advertising and marketing directly and for most products and services that is just not true. But executives think it must be true and so demand it and so they end up hiring / going with the best liar.

lacewing 6mo ago

I'm amazed that Hershey is spending $2B on marketing. I honestly don't think I've seen any advertising for the brand itself at any point in the past decade, and I don't have any positive association with it: it's the "bad" chocolate you buy for cooking? Looking at their subsidiary brands, I don't think I've seen any serious advertising for them either. KitKat is doing viral marketing on social media, but surely, that's not $2B... I've never seen anything for Twizzlers, Pirate's Booty, Milk Duds, Whoppers... the only reason I know these brands is that they're on the shelf in my grocery store. Unless I'm an outlier, I think it's smart of them to stop throwing $2B down whatever hole they're throwing it into right now.

asah 6mo ago
This probably includes "tradespend" - marketing dollars spent on retails and distributors to incentivize premier placement in retail/grocery channels.
malshe 6mo ago
Advertising is a subset of marketing so $2 billion is not all advertising. They probably do a lot of downstream supply chain promotions.
- lacewing 6mo ago
  I understand that there's more to it than TV ads, but Coca-Cola reportedly spends only about 2x as much, and... you'd agree that they get a lot more bang for the buck in terms of selling the brand?
  - malshe 6mo ago
    That's not correct. According to Coca Cola Inc's latest 10-K, the advertising expense for 2025 fiscal year was $5.4 billion. In contrast, Hershey's ad expense was $612 million [1]. That's about 11% of Coke's ad expense. The relevant text from Hershey's latest 10-K (amounts in thousand): Selling, marketing and administrative expense (“SM&A”) represents costs incurred in generating revenues and in managing our business. Such costs include advertising and other marketing expenses, selling expenses, research and development costs, administrative and other indirect overhead costs, amortization of capitalized software and intangible assets and depreciation of administrative facilities. Research and development costs, charged to expense as incurred, totaled $61,655 in 2025, $55,798 in 2024 and $50,030 in 2023. Advertising expense is also charged to expense as incurred and totaled $611,951 in 2025, $600,094 in 2024 and $604,853 in 2023. There was no prepaid advertising expense as of December 31, 2025. Prepaid advertising expense was $1,351 as of December 31, 2024. 1. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/47111/000162828026008586/hsy-20251231.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/47111/00016282802600...

fuckinpuppers 6mo ago

I’m always confused why some companies have to advertise so much. Some companies like Kleenex or Band-aid… they’re synonymous with the product. Hershey is very well known for chocolate and probably many other products under their umbrella. The only marketing you really need is if you see some concerning dips in sales due to competition, or to push a new product. Instead of spending billions on marketing, keep your prices low and competitive, don’t cut corners on quality. I’m tired of companies cutting costs to maximize profits but still marketing to consumers all the same while degrading the products.

genewitch 6mo ago

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.