Tracer

CMOs Struggle to Prove Value of Ad Creative

A Digiday Future of Marketing briefing highlights that many chief marketing officers lack confidence in proving the effectiveness of ad creative to finance teams. A Gain Theory survey of 115 brand marketers found 49% were not confident their data could defend marketing decisions to a CFO, and 62% said they were buying media carrying creative assets whose true value was unknown. Marketers apply more scrutiny to media than creative, while most generative-AI investment targets efficiency rather than measurement. The piece cites advertisers (Lenovo) running integrated media-and-creative measurement with partners (Seedtag, Kantar, Lumen) that delivered measurable brand lifts, and notes measurement vendors (Mutinex, System One) reporting growth. The article frames a widening “confidence gap” that has already led to budget cuts for some marketers and is driving increased investment in measurement and AI-driven MMM approaches.

OpenSRE: Open-Source AI Incident Investigation Agent

OpenSRE is an open-source framework for building AI-powered SRE agents that automate incident investigation and root-cause analysis. Maintained by Tracer and built on LangGraph, the project is Apache 2.0 licensed and designed as a toolkit to ingest alerts, assemble cross-system context (logs, metrics, configs), test hypotheses in parallel, and produce auditable root-cause reports (Slack output by default). It integrates with common observability, data and infra tooling (Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, Airflow, Kafka, Spark, Kubernetes, cloud providers, GitHub, Sentry, PagerDuty). The repo includes a local demo (Grafana + Loki) and onboarding commands to try the agent without touching production.

Hershey Says It Should Own AI Agents and Modernize MMM

Hershey’s VP of media and marketing technology, Vinny Rinaldi, describes how the company built a system of AI agents to accelerate media mix modeling (MMM) and speed measurement from months to weeks. Hershey has worked with vendors including Mutinex, Tracer.tech and Chalice, and has integrated those capabilities into its bidding ecosystem across The Trade Desk, YouTube and Meta. The approach prioritizes “relevance over reach,” influenced Hershey to increase investment in Reddit for Reese’s, and will inform the company’s TV upfront strategy. Rinaldi says Hershey should own agentic planning assets because they are fueled by the brand’s sales and first‑party data, and he emphasizes the importance of building a solid infrastructure foundation and keeping human critical thinking in the loop.