How a 132-year-old brand wins in modern media

Before a single media dollar is spent, an audience is targeted, or a creative concept is finalized — the marketing team at Hershey wants to know one thing: What is the job to be done? It’s a deceptively simple question, and according to Rinaldi, some marketers may not be answering well. The ad creative may look beautiful, but if it’s not connected to the way a brand sells its product, the storytelling ends at the impression. 

“The [campaigns] that really stood out were working it all the way through to retail. This is how it should show up in aisle, on an endcap. The job to be done brings the audience and the creative together,” Rinaldi says. 

For a brand like Reese’s, that means going beyond just selecting the right media channels but also maintaining the integrity of that iconic orange color so that consumers can follow the brand from awareness all the way to the store shelf. Storytelling, Rinaldi argues, is the connective tissue that holds the commercial plan together.

Why chasing ROI alone can quietly hollow out your business 

Hershey — as with many other world-class brands — relies on return on investment (ROI) metrics. And while Rinaldi doesn’t dismiss that entirely, he has come to see a structural problem with ROI as the sole optimization target: It is gameable, and gaming it doesn’t grow the business. 

If a team is incentivized purely to maximize ROI, the rational move is to buy the cheapest inventory available. Cheap inventory can reliably produce strong ROI ratios — but it may not be reaching the right people, in the right context, with enough impact to actually drive revenue targets. The number looks good. The business doesn’t grow. 

Instead of asking, “What’s my return per dollar,” the team now asks, “Am I driving more revenue?” “Is a given channel contributing to incremental growth?” To illustrate the difference, Rinaldi points to a premium CTV partnership where the CPM came in at $60 — high by conventional measures. 

The placement was the single most performant buy in the campaign’s media mix, delivering a massive $300,000 ROAS per dollar spent. 

The answer isn’t to abandon ROI benchmarks entirely — it’s to build a framework that holds both. Hershey’s 70−20−10 investment model does exactly that: 70% of spend goes to proven channels that reliably perform, preserving brand confidence and commercial stability. The remaining 30% creates structured permission to experiment, buy more premium, and try things that would never survive a pure ROI filter. Teams repping individual brands and product lines like Kisses, Ice Breakers, and SkinnyPop can focus on their core business without disruption, while the media team has room to discover what moves the needle. 

A billion-dollar Halloween — and the algorithm behind it 

Hershey’s business is built around four seasonal peaks: Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, and the December holiday season. Together those four windows generate roughly $2.5 billion in revenue. With Halloween delivering the bulk of that revenue, the stakes of getting seasonal execution right are high. 

But the metric that matters most in those windows isn’t impressions or reach. It’s sell-through: moving product off the shelf before markdown day. A single underperforming season creates a cascading effect across the entire commercial plan. “February 15 — the day after Valentine’s Day — if you don’t hit a national average by retailer of sell-through before markdown day, then next year, they buy less. There’s a trickle-down effect on the whole business.” 

To manage this, Hershey has built a media activation system linked directly to retail performance data. The team inputs store-level sales numbers into a zip-code-level algorithm to identify which markets are underperforming against the national average in real time. Media spending is then focused on these specific geographies to drive purchase behavior exactly where the sell-through gap exists, rather than building broad awareness. 

The system works in tandem with tentpole cultural moments like live sports. 

NCAA tournament coverage, for example, becomes a strategic vehicle for Easter sell-through: Hershey surrounds the programming with brand presence, using the cultural influence of the event to pull consumers toward the seasonal purchase. Every tentpole on the calendar gets mapped against seasonal priorities, and the planning and investment teams navigate a complex matrix of brand-specific strategies, each with its own moment, its own audience, and its own path to the register. 

By 2030, trillions in spending is projected to shift to Gen Z. Hershey is preparing now. 

Mass reach is still a core requirement of Hershey’s media strategy — the brand consistently shows up at scale across open internet channels like streaming and CTV, digital, and every other channel where consumers spend time. But beneath that broad ambition lies a more urgent challenge: winning a younger generation. 

Gen Z’s global spending power is projected to reach roughly $12 trillion by 2030.¹ For a company built over 132 years, that is not a distant reality, but an immediate operational one. 

Rinaldi notes, “When you think about our business, [Gen Zers are] the ones who aren’t really eating us that much. So if all of that spending power shifts in less than four years, we’ve got to figure out how to be relevant to them.” 

But Rinaldi is candid about the operational difficulty of moving at the speed of culture. Supply chain constraints mean that chasing a trend requires pulling resources from core production lines. But the ones that work validate the risk. Moving at that pace, says Rinaldi, is “almost impossible” — but not moving is no longer an option.

What’s next: From signal to system 

What Hershey is building now is less about any single channel, season, or audience. The future state Rinaldi describes collapses the distance between insight and action: monthly MMM readouts to assist with more regular optimizations instead of broad reallocations. That, he hopes, will enable Hershey’s campaigns to respond to retail reality in weeks, not seasons. 

That same operating model underpins how Hershey is preparing for the generational shift already underway. The company is doubling down on its 70−20−10 framework to balance scale with speed — protecting core revenue while creating space to test cultural relevance, product adjacency, and new expressions of its iconic brands. 

Rinaldi suggests the throughline is discipline. Not chasing every trend, but building the muscle to act when the right signal appears. Not optimizing for ROI alone, but investing to be most effective for the company’s bottom line. 

For Hershey, winning modern media doesn’t just mean moving fast, but building an operating model where learning compounds, relevance refreshes, and marketing stays tightly coupled to how the business actually grows. 

*Vinny Rinaldi’s perspectives and stats stem from a panel discussion, “A New Definition of Marketing Success,” hosted by The Trade Desk at the Possible conference on April 29, 2026.  

<sub>Source: 
1. NielsenIQ, Spend Z: A Global Report</sub>