American confectionary giant Hershey has turned to Mutinex to speed up and sharpen how it allocates its $2 billion (A$2.8 billion) marketing budget.
Mutinex will provide Hershey with an always-on marketing mix modelling (MMM) support that enables Hershey’s marketing team to make monthly decisions on marketing and trade spend in real-time.
The company previously ran media mix models three times a year, providing a significant months-long lag between the data it uses and the time it receives results.
Over the past year, the company has worked with Mutinex and Tracer to create AI infrastructure that allows it assess performance every month, using four- and 12-week lookbacks.
“When our systems fully launch in May, we’ll have the ability to make fast, informed decisions about where our advertising dollars go based on what’s actually happening right now in the market, not what happened months ago,” Hershey vice president of Consumer Connections Vinny Rinaldi said.
“In the past, we’ve focused on reach. Now, we’re prioritising relevance, boosting the efficiency of every dollar spent.”
The new AI infrastructure will allow Hershey to deploy a ‘multi-agent system’ in which different agents run autonomously to track everything from media performance, competitive pricing, econometrics modelling and researching specific topics using WARC data, all orchestrated by Mutinex’s Maite. Tracer helps clean and organise Hershey’s data which is then fed into Mutinex’s AI platform.
In addition, Hershey will now be able to measure performance across all of its brands with active media, rather than the five it had previously focused on.
In the US, Hershey has dozens of brands including the high-profile chocolate bars Hershey’s, KitKat, Cadbury, Reese’s to candy such as Jolly Rancher, BubbleYum and Shaq A Licious Gummies to snacks such as Pirate’s Booty, Payday and Dot’s Homestyle Pretzels.
“That allows us to buy and optimise all forms of media faster, unlocking growth,” Rinaldi said; the company predicts it will increase revenue attributable to media by up to 5 per cent.
US momentum builds
Mutinex won the business in a competitive RFP process, led by its 15-strong US team including marketing science partner Jess Betts, senior data analyst Mike Jarocki, data scientist Ben Dobrin and head of model scale Joseph Kang.
Mutinex co-founder and global CEO Henry Innis told B&T that Mutinex’s ability to prove its platform could drastically reduce the time and effort spent to translate data into insights and marketing decisions, helped it win the prestigious account.
In the US, there are hundreds of media channels, product lines and markets, which Innis said makes measurement a “high calorific burn” in terms of resources.
“The pain that we solve in Australia is exacerbated greatly in the US,” Innis said.
“What this allows them to do is to speed up the decision making process by running these models continuously. They’ll be able to respond to signals in real time.
“The Hershey’s marketing team now has the ability to answer a growth question quickly and very easily with data.”
Mutinex, which was set up by Innis and co-founder Matt Farrugia in 2018, now works with 15 clients in the US, including the likes of Olaplex, Whirlpool, Turo, AirTasker and Domino’s Canada. In Australia, Mutinex works with the likes of Domino’s, Samsung, Lion, Asahi, You Optus, Seek and more.
The Hershey win is Mutinex’s most high profile US account, and the old slogan ‘there’s a smile in every Hershey bar’ couldn’t ring more true in Mutinex’s New York office (see image above).
Innis described the partnership as a “momentous moment for the company”.
“We love working with the best customers who push us very hard in terms of innovation and where we will take our product,” Innis said.
“Winning a brand of the calibre of Hershey’s and that has such a sophisticated marketing team, is huge. I think it will give us access to huge amounts of product opportunities that we just wouldn’t otherwise have.”
The win should also provide Mutinex with new business opportunities as it continues to build momentum in the world’s largest media and advertising market.
Recently, Mutinex appointed Mike Finnerty as president, US, and veteran marketing leader Lou Paskalis as senior advisor.
Innis said that Mutinex’s immediate focus is on continuing to build momentum in the US and ensuring that it is delivering a “world class product” to its customers.
Within the next two to three years, depending on market conditions, Mutinex could expand into the UK and Europe.
“I’d like to get something in Europe a little bit earlier, but it’s also slightly dependent on people,” Innis said.
“I may have staff members that may want to go and set up in London for personal reasons so there may be an opportunistic moment. I’d love to tell you there’s a well thought through master plan, but often these things are a little bit more reactive than that.”
