Ding Dong. Where’s Your Candy Converter?

Reese’s is not sorry.

The Hershey’s brand is not sorry that its candy is superior.

Now that Halloween is here, Reese’s is not sorry if you choose to be an anti-social candy hoarder, instead of a good neighbor.

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Ad Age reports that Hershey Co. last year put brand PR within its marketing department, reporting to Jill Baskin, chief marketing officer. The group had previously sat inside the corporate communications department. Now, brand PR is involved in nearly everything the marketing teams do. And it’s paying off: Total impressions across all Hershey brands grew from 9 billion in 2017 to 18 billion last year and this year have already surpassed the 33 billion mark.

Ryan Riess, director of Hershey’s in-house agency—known as “C-Sweet”—and Anna Lingeris, senior manager for earned media, recently held a town hall with brand marketers to go over the finer points of what makes something newsworthy.

• Is it new?
• Is it first?
• Is it topical?

Reese’s checked all of those boxes last year at this time.

The brand introduced the “Candy Converter,” a vending machine placed near Washington Square Park in New York City last Halloween that let people deposit candy they dislike for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

The idea came from Anomaly, but PR intervened so it was launched at the perfect time: three days before Halloween, not on the day itself, “so all the press leading up to Halloween was about his crazy contraption,” Lingeris says.