Hershey Raises the Bar on Media Measurement

The Challenge

Since its founding in 1894, the Hershey Chocolate Company has grown to more than 90 brands, from candy classics like Reese’s, Hershey’s Kisses, and Twizzlers to snack favorites like SkinnyPop popcorn and Pirate’s Booty.

Maximizing the value of this enviable roster of brands has presented unique challenges for the Hershey team. For one, media planning typically happened at the brand level, creating inefficiencies at the broader portfolio level. Hershey brands have a significant amount of audience overlap, so, for example, the media team might unintentionally target the same consumers with Reese’s ads on Meta and KitKat ads on Snap. As Kyle Shank, Hershey’s Head of Media Technology, Analytics, and Operations, said, “I’ve got a beautiful portfolio of brands. I need to start thinking like a portfolio.”

The second issue Hershey faced is common for most CPGs – a lack of first-party data. Since customers generally buy candy and snacks at retailers, Hershey doesn’t have their own store traffic, transaction, loyalty, or e-commerce data. Their team needed to get the most out of the little first-party data they had and create better ways to incorporate the partner data they relied on.

Lastly, retail media networks have become a strategically critical advertising investment for Hershey, and the team needed to be able to better measure the value of their investment. CPG-retail media network relationships are multifaceted, as CPGs sell their products to retailers and then buy advertising from their media networks. The Hershey team sought greater transparency and media governance.

The Solution

As a large, historic company, Hershey has many checks and balances in place to ensure that investments are worthwhile, and the team was rigorous in vetting new solutions. They started by using data clean rooms provided by large technology platforms to look at portfolio overlap.

The team found this was a useful start, but they had to replicate their analysis within each walled garden clean room, and their data was fragmented across publishers – sometimes across different departments within a single publisher. They wanted a more holistic and flexible clean room solution that could help them with even the stickiest measurement challenges.

The Hershey team decided to partner with LiveRamp to adopt the LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu, enabling advanced permissioning, comprehensive measurement, and other innovative data collaboration capabilities in a secure environment. LiveRamp empowers companies to use one platform for campaign measurement and to connect data seamlessly across clouds, warehouses, and clean rooms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, and Databricks.

LiveRamp supports the widest possible range of data collaboration use cases and offers complete flexibility to operate wherever data lives. Solutions are built for the cloud, with no data replication or movement needed. The LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu, has full configurability, controls, and permissioning so the Hershey team could build and collaborate the way that worked best for their business.

Most importantly, the Hershey team felt confident knowing that LiveRamp is a leader in customer privacy. This was critical for a brand that has built consumer love and trust since the 19th century.

The Results

With the LiveRamp Clean Room, the Hershey team has been able to understand customer overlap and monitor holistic advertising performance across its portfolio of brands. The team has the insights they need to nimbly optimize campaigns, make spend more efficient, and increase return on advertising spend (ROAS).

In the clean room, the Hershey team is also unlocking more value from their first-party data and leveraging partner data sets to enhance insights, improve targeting, and take measurement to the next level. One example was a campaign in which Hershey used geography and store-focused first-party data to deliver impressions in places where they had particular sell-through demands. The data collaboration, which entailed bringing simple data sets into the clean room and using a privacy-centric, pseudonymized identifier for matching, was described by Kyle Shank as “a huge success.”

The LiveRamp Clean Room has also helped the Hershey team with retail media network measurement. For example, they built a suite of dashboards within the clean room to monitor advertising performance with a major retail partner across a number of initiatives, from sponsored products to TV. The retailer isn’t equipped to provide integrated reporting that spans its many departments and channels, but the Hershey team has long felt that a seamless, full-funnel view is critical to measuring and optimizing the effectiveness of their large investment.

With this suite of dashboards, the team can truly understand ad performance and make better decisions. They can also make the dashboards available to other Hershey stakeholders and agency partners, who use the insights to inform their own strategies.

This is just the beginning of advertising innovation for Hershey. Not only have they overcome longtime measurement challenges to make their advertising work better, they have created new opportunities to build brand and business value for their iconic company. With these new tools, Hershey can discover and activate new audiences, while deepening their relationships with retail partners and protecting consumer trust. They can easily tap into LiveRamp’s premier global ecosystem of partners to discover new insights that inspire innovation and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Hershey has a long legacy of creating “moments of goodness,” like bringing friends and family together for s’mores around a campfire, or discovering a Hershey’s Kiss packed with love in a lunch box. With the team’s new insights and capabilities, the possibilities for creating moments of goodness are endless.