Hershey's Instacart and Roku Case Study: The Brand That Owns the Layer

Most brands debating agentic AI are still negotiating the activation layer. Hershey documented all three — activation, measurement, and philosophy — publicly in a single quarter. The sequence is the strategy, and it runs in the opposite order from how most CPG brands are approaching this.

Vinny Rinaldi, VP of Consumer Connections at The Hershey Company, published the framework from Possible last week.

"Agents multiply whatever infrastructure you've already built — good or bad."

His post wasn't theoretical.

Hershey ran Reese's on Roku through an OK-to-Text interactive format with Instacart as the purchase endpoint.

The Roku campaign delivered a verified four times return on ad spend. 84% of users who showed purchase consideration were new-to-brand buyers. For a category that has spent a decade treating streaming as an awareness vehicle, that changes the math heading into this upfront cycle.

Hershey partnered with Mutinex and Tracer to rebuild its marketing mix modeling (MMM) infrastructure. The previous system delivered 2024 results mid-2025. The new one runs monthly across the full brand portfolio. Two billion dollars in media and trade spend now moves on twelve reads a year instead of three. Rinaldi called it a complete game-changer for the organization.

The architecture argument ties both together. Rinaldi's case at Possible wasn't about tools. It was about ownership. Closed systems that ask brands to trust outputs without understanding the logic aren't efficient at scale. They are a liability. Clean data, auditable identity, and measurement tied to actual business outcomes are the precondition for handing any agentic layer meaningful control — not a feature to add later.

Most brands are adopting agentic tooling before the data foundation exists to make it trustworthy. Hershey built the foundation first, ran the proof of concept second, and published the blueprint third.

The window Rinaldi described is open. Brands building the infrastructure now own the benchmark data when the category standardizes. The brands waiting for a turnkey solution from their agency or platform are building dependency, not capability.

Ecosystem builders compound. Hershey just showed CPG brands what that looks like when the closed loop runs from streaming impression to verified purchase to monthly budget reallocation — and the brand owns every layer it runs on.