The Funnel is a Maze: Rethinking Strategy in 2025

The funnel is no longer a shape—it's a maze. And too many marketers are still pretending it's a straight line.

The problem with the funnel

Over the past decade, "full-funnel" has evolved into a safe slide that makes every presentation feel comprehensive. The reality is starkly different. Consumers don't follow neat progressions anymore. They bounce between YouTube and TikTok, pause Netflix shows to search for products, discover brands through podcasts, and make purchases via retail media networks that didn't exist five years ago.

The numbers paint a clear picture of this fragmentation. Streaming now accounts for 47.3% of total U.S. television usage, surpassing broadcast and cable combined. More than 11 streaming platforms each hold over 1% market share, fragmenting audiences across an unprecedented number of touchpoints.

Meanwhile, marketers are drowning in complexity. Nielsen reports that marketers now juggle 15 distinct channels—from linear TV and radio to search, social, CTV, and podcasts. This explosion of touchpoints has created what BCG describes as a fundamental mismatch: marketers continue to "force-fit" complex consumer paths into linear models, a strategy that "risks missing opportunities."

The traditional funnel assumes a logical sequence that simply doesn't exist. Edelman's research confirms this disconnect, finding that "today's buying behavior is too dynamic for a linear funnel." Purchase often marks the beginning of an ongoing relationship, not its conclusion.

{{funnel-maze-1="/tables"}}
‍

Why agencies struggle

Agencies find themselves caught between competing incentives that prioritize platform revenue over client outcomes. The dominant demand-side platforms and walled gardens have built systems that reward their own growth rather than advertiser success.

Consider how platform incentives distort decision-making. Google's DV360 prioritizes YouTube inventory, Yahoo pushes its owned properties, and The Trade Desk favors its highest-value partnerships. As one industry expert notes, marketers have "traded control for convenience—accepting the opacity of the walled gardens" where "audience creation, delivery, and attribution all live inside a few closed systems."

This creates a cascade of problems. Agencies optimize campaigns based on each platform's preferred metrics—clicks, impressions, viewability—rather than holistic business outcomes. Over half of marketers remain stuck using reach and frequency proxies instead of true ROI metrics, largely because the available tools incentivize short-term metrics over long-term value.

The programmatic supply chain compounds these challenges. A recent ANA study found that $26.8 billion of global programmatic spend—over one-third—is wasted through inefficiencies. Less than half of each ad dollar actually reaches consumers. Bid stream recycling inflates costs unnecessarily, with $25 CPM bids jumping between multiple supply-side platforms and emerging at $34+ CPM.

The measurement problem is equally acute. 62% of marketers use multiple tools to measure cross-media campaigns, yet just 54% feel confident in end-to-end measurement. This fragmentation creates information silos that prevent agencies from demonstrating full-funnel impact or reallocating budgets effectively.

Rethinking full-funnel in 2025

The funnel concepts—awareness, consideration, conversion—retain their relevance, but measurement must evolve. Rather than chasing linear stages, agencies should align each phase with clear business outcomes while adopting neutral, cross-channel tools that escape platform bias.

• Awareness demands brand impact measurement. Traditional reach metrics tell an incomplete story. Modern campaigns should track aided and unaided awareness lift, attention metrics, and engagement quality. Nielsen's research shows that roughly a 1-point increase in brand awareness yields approximately 1% sales lift. Attention metrics are gaining ground for measuring ad impact beyond simple impressions, focusing on viewable time and emotional response.
• Consideration requires cross-channel engagement analysis. This means evaluating how consumers move between touchpoints: TV-driven website traffic, social engagement that spurs branded searches, and retail media influence on purchase consideration. Agencies should measure audience expansion—tracking how many new consumers entered the consideration set through campaign influence, moving beyond last-click attribution to understand how CTV or influencer content affects downstream behavior.

Conversion must tie directly to sales efficiency. CFOs speak a different language: ROI. Performance measurement should prioritize cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, and incremental revenue. Test-and-control methodologies or marketing mix modeling should credit ads with actual sales lifts rather than proxy interactions.

{{funnel-maze-2="/tables"}}
‍

This approach demands neutral, cross-platform tools that avoid lock-in to any single ecosystem. The trend is toward what industry observers call "Open Garden" strategies—building first-party data graphs and identity layers so brands can manage reach and frequency on the marketer's terms, not just inside a single platform.

The role of AI and outcome-focused platforms

The core problems we’ve outlined—nonlinear journeys, channel sprawl, and platform bias—are computational. AI helps in three practical ways: it forecasts which mixes will hit your goals, it reallocates budget as signals change, and it explains which levers actually moved results. 

Independent research backs the upside when it’s done well: McKinsey reports companies investing in AI see 3–15% revenue uplift and 10–20% sales ROI uplift in marketing and sales use cases. 

On the measurement side, Nielsen shows AI-driven buying can outperform manual setups on ROAS and sales effectiveness in controlled MMM analyses.

Modern AI tools can also help accelerate the strategic shift by automating data-heavy tasks while ensuring transparency. Rather than accepting black-box optimization, agencies need platforms that explain every decision and optimize toward custom business objectives.

AI Digital's Elevate platform embodies this approach. The system's AI planner ingests historical data and campaign goals to generate detailed, unbiased media plans in approximately 30 seconds, providing cross-channel strategies with 95% forecasting confidence without manual spreadsheet work.

More importantly, campaigns receive continuous optimization—every 15 minutes—against custom KPIs rather than generic platform objectives. Elevate's proprietary Impact Score identifies under- and over-performing segments in real time, with AI that reports exactly how each bid or budget decision aligns with defined business goals. This matters because it shifts focus from media metrics to business outcomes.

Complementing AI-driven planning, the Smart Supply solution addresses programmatic inefficiencies through premium inventory selection. By establishing direct SSP relationships and eliminating DSP bias, these approaches filter out fraud and invalid traffic while building AI-optimized deal IDs tailored to specific campaign KPIs. The result: brand-safe, high-quality placements that improve precision and reduce wasted spend.

Where the market is headed

The boundaries between funnel stages are dissolving as retail media and CTV merge upper- and lower-funnel tactics. 

Shoppable and interactive ad formats exemplify this convergence: Amazon enables direct purchases from Prime Video content, TikTok integrates commerce within discovery experiences, and YouTube and Netflix test pause-frame purchasing options.

These innovations collapse traditional attribution models by enabling closed-loop measurement from discovery to sale. Shoppable media investments are rising as brands seek direct connections between content and commerce.

Premium, brand-safe environments are simultaneously gaining importance. Experts report that 89% of CTV advertisers now prioritize premium video content, with 83% emphasizing brand safety in streaming campaigns. Over half view CTV as safer and more effective than social media alternatives.

Agencies that channel first-party audiences into clean, high-quality inventory environments while maintaining cross-platform measurement capabilities will command superior results. Those clinging to outdated funnel models risk irrelevance as consumer behavior continues evolving beyond linear progressions.

Conclusion

The future of full-funnel marketing isn't about awareness-to-conversion slides—it's about outcome-driven media intelligence that adapts to consumer reality rather than forcing behavior into predetermined models.

Successful agencies will embrace three fundamental shifts: 

1. First, they'll move beyond platform-centric metrics to business accountability, tying every campaign stage to measurable outcomes. 
2. Second, they'll adopt neutral AI-powered tools that optimize toward custom KPIs rather than generic platform objectives. 
3. Third, they'll build transparent measurement frameworks that demonstrate real impact rather than proxy performance.

The maze isn't going away. Consumer journeys will only become more complex as new channels emerge and existing platforms evolve. But agencies that stop pretending the funnel is linear—and start building strategies around outcomes rather than touchpoints—will find their way through the complexity.

The maze requires different thinking, not just better maps.

If you want to talk about these shifts, let’s chat. Reach out to AI Digital, and we’ll help chart the path forward.