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Episode 168
The Death of the Funnel
Concern about short-termism among marketers jumped from 25% in 2022 to 55% in 2025. Budget allocation barely moved. The funnel may not be dead, but it might be damaging your brand.
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob debate whether the marketing funnel still belongs in the boardroom. They unpack why the funnel persists despite strong evidence against it, how ad platforms reinforce flawed thinking for commercial reasons, and what alternatives actually work.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] Marketing Week research on why funnel reinvention is backfiring
• [02:00] The funnel as a mental shortcut vs. a map of how people actually buy
• [05:00] How ad platforms built funnel-stage products for commercial reasons
• [07:00] Categories where the funnel fits (and where it falls apart)
• [11:00] The say-do gap: marketers believe in brand investment but budgets barely moved
• [15:00] Tom Roach's alternative: building, nudging, and connecting
• [18:00] How to plan media without the funnel
• [20:00] What great creative looks like when you stop thinking in funnel stages
Resources:
2025 Marketing Week Article
Google Messy Middle Research
WARC Multiplier Effect Report
Thinkbox Profitability 2 Report
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
CMO
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Transcript
Elena: Hello, and welcome to "The Marketing Architects," a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the chief product architect of Misfits & Machines.
Angela: Hello.
Rob: Hello.
Elena: We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. Today, we're talking about the marketing funnel. Is it dead? Dying? Is it just misunderstood? Everyone from Google to Ehrenberg-Bass to the trade press has declared the traditional funnel is obsolete. But if we kill the funnel, what do we do instead? And does constantly reinventing it actually help marketers, or is it just making it harder to communicate our results? That is the topic for today, and I'm gonna kick us off, as I always do, with some research. This episode was inspired by a recent "Marketing Week" article by The Trade Desk's Reality Check column titled "Marketers' Constant Attempts to Reinvent the Funnel Are Losing Them Credibility." The article acknowledges the growing body of evidence that the traditional awareness-consideration-conversion funnel oversimplifies how people actually buy. Google released some research called the Messy Middle, and they show that buyers don't move linearly — they loop between exploring and evaluating in chaotic, unpredictable ways. And WARC's Multiplier Effect Report made the case that separating brand and performance into upper and lower funnel buckets is a false dichotomy. Thinkbox has also released research on this in their Profitability 2 report, showing that the media mix across categories is heavily biased towards short-term tactics, and therefore not optimized for ROI or profit. But this article argues that all this funnel reinvention is actually backfiring. The authors tested new frameworks with senior marketers, and the feedback was brutal. They said things like, "It's too complicated. If it takes more than a couple minutes to understand a chart, I've lost the executive." Another said that they could see pushback if they tried to replace the language of awareness, consideration, and conversion. So the evidence for rethinking the funnel is strong, but the marketing industry's habit of constantly replacing it with something more complex might hurt our credibility. Okay. Let's get into it. I thought we should just go ahead and start with the question everyone listening probably just wants to have answered: Is the Funnel Still a Relevant Framework?
Do we think the funnel is still a relevant framework for marketers? Why don't you kick us off, Ange?
Angela: Sure. I'm a fan of mental shortcuts, and I think the funnel is useful as a shortcut, but I think somewhere along the way, marketers started treating it as a map of how humans behave, and I think that's what this article speaks to, what you're speaking to, Elena. What the research shows across thousands of campaigns, millions of dollars in spend, many, many years, is that advertising works by shifting probabilities. Every time someone sees your brand, you're incrementally increasing the chance they'll choose you the next time they're buying in your category, and that happens very slowly across many years, mostly outside of any purchase moment. I think the funnel implies people are moving through stages with intention, and the reality is that most buying is very low involvement. It's very fast. It's habitual. People reach for what's familiar. The brands that end up winning are the ones with the strongest mental availability, meaning when a buying moment arrives, your brand is the one that comes to mind first. So the funnel doesn't really have a great mechanism for that. It's built around a rational, sequential buyer who in most categories simply doesn't exist. Rob is a funnel nightmare for a marketer. I don't know — are you really easy to shift? We're really easy to shift Rob's probability of purchase, but maybe not necessarily related to the brand. You were just trying to sell me on a —
Rob: I just —
Angela: $600,000 mattress. Yeah.
Rob: Gosh, yeah. I agree with you, Ange. You know, it's funny, I heard someone use this analogy once. The QWERTY keyboard, right? The QWERTY keyboard is really not optimal, right? But we've all sort of learned it. We all kind of use it. I mean, it's a framework. So from that standpoint, the funnel's relevant. But yeah, it's not exactly optimal.
Elena: I'm sorry, what's the QWERTY keyboard?
Rob: Oh, come on. Are you serious? I'd like you to look at your keyboard and read the top row of keys. See, this is a learning podcast. We're all learning here.
Elena: Okay — is that my keyboard?
Angela: You just made Rob's day.
Rob: If there was gonna be a highlight reel, can we please earmark that one?
Elena: Ange, did you know what that was?
Angela: It's not commonly referred to as that, I will give you that.
Elena: Never in my life have I heard that.
Rob: I'm old.
Angela: You are.
Rob: Clearly.
Elena: Okay, I'm sorry, Rob, I got so caught up in that, I wasn't really listening to what you said.
Angela: I have no idea what you said.
Rob: I'm used to not being listened to.
Elena: So you're saying it's not perfect, but it's what we have.
Rob: It's what we have, it's what we know. We sort of learned it, and it's useful because it's what we know.
Elena: Yeah. I would agree with you. I think that it's useful for teaching someone generally about how marketing could work. Where maybe it becomes not as useful is when you are truly planning all of your marketing decisions around a traditional funnel. And a lot of ad platforms have built their products around the funnel, so sometimes marketers are sort of forced into that thinking. Meta literally lets you optimize for awareness, consideration, or conversion, and a lot of the other similar platforms do the same.
How much do we think the funnel is surviving just because these platforms are sort of forcing it on marketers? I have a take on how much we're actually using the funnel a little later, just in terms of budgeting decisions and things like that. But, you know, platforms built funnel-stage optimization into their products because it sells more campaign types.
Angela: That's just a commercial decision dressed up as media science, and marketers accept it because the interface makes it feel sort of rigorous, I think. The deeper problem is that platforms control the measurement, and that measurement is built on last-touch attribution, meaning the platform gives credit to whatever touchpoint happened closest to purchase. So your paid search campaign looks brilliant, your television potentially looks weak, and the data confirms that you should shift more money towards search. But when we think about what econometric modeling shows consistently across categories, it's that a huge share of those search clicks exist because of the brand advertising that happened weeks or months earlier. The person typed your brand name into Google because something made your brand mentally available to them. The platform takes the credit for the click, the brand investment that caused the click potentially gets cut. So it's just a very expensive misreading of cause and effect. I think it can be really dangerous, these different campaign types in these platforms, and it's happening at enormous scale across the industry.
Rob: I think when it comes to something like Meta, it's not a funnel — it's a syringe, it's pumping cash right into the veins of Zuckerberg. It is just perfectly designed to make money for the connected platforms. I mean, it was like engineered. And why wouldn't they continue to build around that in their case studies and in their best practices? We already know the language, so it must be right, and that's why they make the money they do.
Elena: When I was prepping for this episode, one thing I was thinking of is — are there categories where the funnel actually does describe really well how people buy, and then are there others where it just naturally falls completely apart? What do we think?
Angela: Yeah, I mean, I think there are categories where there's maybe more relevance. High-consideration purchases would come to mind for me. Enterprise software, mortgages, a new car, something where a person likely spends weeks researching, involves multiple decision makers, goes through a genuine evaluation process. Even there, I'd say it describes a process more than it explains what advertising should do, but the shoe fits a little more in high consideration. Where it falls apart are categories like packaged goods — cereal, shampoo, beer. People buy those categories dozens of times, if not more, a year, quickly, with almost zero deliberation. They reach for a brand that comes to mind first or is just there on the shelf. Mental availability and physical availability are really important. That's Byron Sharp's framework at Ehrenberg-Bass, and the data behind that is super strong. The category I think that really illustrates a bit of a trap is the D2C world, right? They grew up in digital environments where every stage of the funnel was trackable, so it felt like validation. But where they were actually measuring was a very small population of highly activated buyers, while the much larger pool of potential customers stayed outside of their view. And so they optimized the funnel — quote unquote — "brilliantly" and hit a growth ceiling. And the lack of focus on reaching a broader audience fed into that problem, because they had insufficient reach, which is, as we know, a really important lever for growth.
Rob: Is it an oversimplification or overgeneralization to say that B2B tends to be better for the funnel than B2C?
Angela: Yeah, I mean, I think there's B2C that still has more of a funnel in terms of the customer journey that a consumer would go through. But I think it's fair that a lot of B2B SaaS, platform purchase decisions and things like that, are heavily researched. You're probably not being shopped if you're not one of the top five that that person knows about, so awareness is super important. There's not a lot of physical availability in the B2B world, which can make it hard — where top-of-funnel awareness matters more. So I could kind of go with you there.
Rob: In B2B, you tend to have a committee making a decision, so —
Elena: Yeah. What's crazy, though, is there's research that shows most B2B buying decisions still go with the first brand you had in mind. So even in B2B, it falls apart a little bit. Rob, what do you think? Did you have any categories in mind?
Rob: I was just asking. I thought the B2B thing — I mean, no. Well, I'm just learning like everyone else out there right now. I was even thinking about software as well, just SaaS — you can get caught up in the funnel pretty easily because you are doing research, you're trying to figure it out. And I think we've even seen in our own product experience when we were developing products ourselves. We've talked about it a million times, but like with Stuffies, where the funnel actually didn't work, right? Like, if we were going to sit here and go, "Okay, we're really building funnels for mom," we would've missed out on the real buyer — grandmas. So there are definitely cases in the consumer space where it can definitely go backwards on you.
Elena: Yeah. I was thinking the funnel can fall apart in any category, really, so pick your poison. Where I was trying to think of ones where it does apply well — I think it's almost categories where there's external pressure to go through the funnel. I was thinking about college admissions. Like, they always say, "Okay, you should look, become aware of a lot of different colleges, consider — you've gotta tour more than one." I was always told that. You can't just go with the first one you look at and then make the decision. Or wedding venues, same thing. And that could apply to B2B SaaS too, if you have to show everyone, "Hey, I went through this process." But you still might have something in mind that you know you're going to go with no matter what, and you just have to go through this sort of fake funnel in order to prove that the school you picked, or the venue, or the software, has actually been vetted when someone had something in mind all along.
Angela: Yeah. So high consideration is probably the common denominator, yes.
Elena: Um, well, one thing I was wondering about — Ange, there are a lot of articles out there. If you search "is the funnel dead" online, you can find a lot of commentary on it. Not hard to find an article to feature for this.
Do you think senior marketers at big brands are truly using the funnel as their primary marketing framework? Like, do we think this problem is maybe overblown? Are sophisticated marketers still relying on it?
Angela: Yeah. It's hard to know for sure what level of dependency they have, but I would say this: I think brands genuinely care about awareness. I think there are very few boardrooms in the United States or in the world where you've got a board saying awareness doesn't matter. But caring about awareness and making good investment decisions because of it are two very different things. WARC just published data — I think I saw it yesterday — showing concern about short-termism went from 25% of marketers in 2022 to 55% of marketers in 2025. So the worry is real and growing, and yet budget allocation barely moved in that same period. WARC calls that the say-do gap. And the reason it persists comes back to what we just said about attribution. When last touch gives all the credit to the bottom, brand investment becomes invisible in the quarterly numbers. So even marketers who intellectually believe in awareness end up systematically defunding it because the data that they're handed — or that they're pulling out of their attribution — tells them to. The funnel gives us this language for awareness, but I think marketers are having a hard time tying a measurement system to it that actually protects those funds.
Elena: Did you say the WARC data was, like, 20% to 50%?
Angela: 25% in 2022 to 55% in 2025.
Elena: Oh, sad. That is the wrong direction.
Angela: It is. What are we doing here? Yeah.
Elena: Not enough, clearly. Rob, what do you — oh wait, Rob, you don't need to say what you think about that for Ange.
Rob: Got it.
Elena: Yes. Sorry to scare you.
Rob: It's really hard going after Ange when she gives these —
Elena: I know.
Rob: Where she's so good — I'm just like, "Let me make a joke."
Elena: Um, okay.
Let's talk about what the real cost of this sort of thinking is. I'm excited for this question. Can we point to specific bad decisions that we think brands make because they're trapped by platforms or their own thinking around funnel stages?
Angela: Well, I was thinking about the creative brief, where maybe funnel thinking does its earliest consistent damage in a campaign. If a brand decides TV is an upper-funnel channel, that label can kind of shape the brief. So the brief says, "Build emotion, tell a story," and the agency delivers something that's cinematic and beautiful and completely impractical for the person who might be watching it. The problem there is that TV reaches everybody simultaneously — people who've never heard of you, people who bought last week, and people who are actively shopping right now and would respond to something clear and useful. Funnel thinking told you those people belong in a different channel, so your TV creative could potentially ignore them entirely. I think we've talked about this before. The best TV creative holds both jobs at once. It builds memory for that out-of-market viewer — the person that might be buying six months from now who needs your brand lodged in their head before that moment arrives — and it gives the in-market viewer something practical and actionable, with a clear offer, a simple CTA, a direct articulation of what you do. Campaigns with both emotional resonance and a clear call to action outperform purely emotional campaigns on both long and short-term metrics. Emotion makes you memorable. Clarity makes you useful. And the funnel, I think, convinced marketers that those two jobs belong in separate channels or at least separate creative briefs.
Rob: Is it too elementary at the end of the day to just say — looking at what the costs are — there are three big ones? Simplifying it: you ultimately starve the top to feed the bottom, right? And you're really paying through the nose to target people that are already interested in you, and you're continuing to battle finance with "are we doing short-term wins or long-term brand shrinkage?"
Angela: It's a good point, Rob. You're starving the top, but what that in turn does is starve the bottom eventually.
Rob: Right. Absolutely. But it feels like that's what you're doing — reallocating energy that isn't gonna deliver right away to hit that spreadsheet.
Elena: All right. So we've talked about, I think pretty thoroughly, the challenges with the traditional funnel, and we're not alone. The marketing industry also seems to broadly feel that the funnel is out of date. So instead, people have been proposing new models — things like the Messy Middle, fractals, flywheels, infinity loops. We love an infinity loop. And the senior marketers interviewed for the article I opened with said they felt these replacements were often too complex for the boardroom. So if the funnel is easy to understand, executives are more likely to lean into it. When people have been trying to use these more complicated models, they feel like they're going to lose the executives. Tom Roach, who has been one of the bigger critics of the funnel, actually agrees that we'd be, as he says, mad to try and kill it. Instead, he proposed a modified funnel that swaps awareness, consideration, and conversion for building, nudging, and connecting. So he's keeping the simple shape, but updating the thinking behind it. So what do we think?
Is there an alternative framework to the funnel that we like?
Angela: I think this is dependent upon the brand that you work for — at least for the marketing team internally. But if we're going to orient the board or the executive management team to a simple framework so that we have a common language and can keep the brand moving in the right direction in terms of what's ultimately gonna drive growth, I just come back to Binet and Field on the investment side. Long-term brand building and short-term activation work together, with roughly a 60/40 starting point as an anchor. And then Sharp on the audience side — reach as many buyers and potential buyers in your category as possible with creative that builds distinctive memory structures. Those two things together replace most of what the funnel is trying to do. Again, the marketing team can break that down and go, "Okay, do we want to stay with awareness, consideration, and ultimately conversion and intent, or do we move over to Tom Roach's model?" Specific to that brand. But I think the reason they've struggled to replace the funnel in boardrooms is measurement. Mental availability growing is a real thing with real business impact, but it's harder to put in a quarterly dashboard than a conversion rate. So the funnel wins on reportability. And until you have a measurement system that the board trusts — whether that's econometrics or incrementality testing — you'll keep defaulting back to the funnel because those are the metrics that show up cleanly in the numbers.
Rob: I totally agree with Roach. I think if you take a step back, we're all in the world of branding, and we've talked about on this podcast just how hard it is to create a brand, right? And the funnel is a brand, whether you like it or you don't. It's really hard to replace it. And if you're going to come in like a new CMO and go, "We just need a new logo, we need a new brand," we know that's just difficult, and there's so much equity in the funnel. But evolving the brand to start to mean something that's much clearer and more meaningful — I think that's spot on. I like Tom Roach's language — building, nudging, connecting. I think that's really easy to remember and feels more authentic to what we're trying to do. And poor Roach, man. If a guy needed rebranding himself — get a different last name.
Elena: Oh —
Angela: Oh, he's so distinctive.
Rob: You're either an insect or something that holds a joint. It's just not a fun last name to have. So we can cut that. I just thought I'd share. We're on the topic of branding. Saying the name Tom Roach is just — it sounds like a Marvel character.
Elena: Okay. Um, no, I think that's great. I think both of your perspectives could come together. I like Tom Roach's approach — it's almost like he's taking the funnel and making it a little more squishy, not so precise. And then Ange, I agree, eventually trying to move into more of the Binet and Field thinking — the long and the short — but that probably takes education and time, and it depends on your company's situation. If your brand's not doing well, probably not a great time to walk in and say, "We're not gonna report on conversion funnel numbers anymore."
Angela: Well, and too, to the point earlier — are we in a high-consideration sale, or are we buying toothpaste?
Elena: Exactly.
Angela: What are the things that really matter in terms of what's gonna drive growth?
Elena: Mm-hmm. Agreed. What about thinking about this from a media planning perspective, Ange?
If a brand came to us and said, "We want to try to move beyond funnel-based media planning," what would you tell them to do instead?
Angela: Yeah. Start with reach. The first question I think every brand should answer is: what's the share of the total category buying population that we've reached with the advertising we're doing — or have done in the last, say, 12 months? In most cases, I think that number is shockingly low. Brands spend enormous energy optimizing a small audience while the majority of potential buyers stay untouched. Once you know that number, the planning question becomes much clearer. How do we maximize reach across the full category with the right balance of brand building and short-term activation? The 60/40 is just an anchor for a starting point, but there's a lot of research to dig into. You can survey your own customer audiences as well to better understand what percent of that audience is shopping at any given time, to help inform what that media plan should look like. But I would say this too: before you get to redesigning the media plan, you need to rebuild the measurement system, because if you change your strategy but keep last-touch attribution as your reporting system, you're gonna recreate funnel logic regardless of what you call the new framework. The measurement is where the funnel actually lives. So fix that first, and the media plan becomes a much more honest — and a little easier to plan around — conversation.
Elena: Yeah, that's a good point — probably start with measurement first, and then figure out how to adjust our media. Um, Rob, Ange talked a bit earlier about how the funnel can affect our creative decisions, and one way it has is it's created this sort of artificial divide between your brand creative and your direct creative. So, what do you think great creative looks like when you stop thinking in these distinct funnel stages?
Rob: Yeah. I think to just acknowledge what you said there from a best-practices standpoint, it certainly makes sense that people are looking at where their ad is in the funnel, right? That's just nature. Maybe higher up in the funnel, you're going to lean a little more brand in nature. Lower in the funnel, you're gonna try to close the deal. That makes sense. But at the end of the day, and Ange said it well, we've always lived by the philosophy at Marketing Architects: remarkable work that works remarkably. So there's a job to be done here, and that job is twofold. One is to seed great distinctive assets into the minds of the consumer, build that mental availability. But we're also in advertising, and we are here to sell product at the end of the day. The agency that I started at many, many moons ago used the line, "Sales overnight, brand over time." And I thought that was smart then, it's smart now. That is the job we are trying to do at the end of the day, and that's the job your creative should be doing.
Elena: I do think it's smart to look at where an ad is landing in the funnel and whether someone is about to make a purchase, and adjust your creative accordingly. I also think you can go way too far with that sometimes — like, you don't necessarily always need to tell people over and over, "Buy this, buy this. Buy it now, buy it now." People aren't dumb. They're gonna know to click through and buy.
Rob: Absolutely. But it's still — even at the bottom of the funnel, even when you are asking for that sale, there's still a branding opportunity. That's where your distinctive assets can still live. And sometimes we just throw that stuff out because we're like, "Close the deal." But we're still borrowing that equity that we paid good money for higher up in the funnel. Let it work for you.
Elena: Yep. All right. Well, to wrap us up, when are you most likely to resort to impulse buying?
Angela: Yeah, I can jump in here. I mean, I just think for me the funnel kind of collapses in moments where physical availability really matters. I think about airports, gas stations. You know, I walk in probably not really needing anything, and I go from buying nothing to buying something I don't need in about 30 seconds. And the funnel really had pretty little to do with it. I purchased what was available and visible. Maybe brand preference played a role in what I grabbed, but what that situation really shows is how important physical availability is — not just being stocked and being there, but even things like shelf placement, proximity to the register, how convenient you can be inside of a convenience store. So that's where I think of it.
Rob: I definitely resort to impulse buying when I'm awake. You know, there's just so much goodness out there to be had, and in today's world it just keeps coming at us. I mean, Amazon — come on. How does it know what I want? You only push a button and it shows up at your door. It's like we are engineering a world where impulse buying is probably the primary mode of buying.
Angela: It's crazy how Amazon really disrupted physical availability. Because typically you think of an online purchase as not physically available, but the speed at which you can get it — and how you make buying decisions differently today based on that availability and speed to the front porch, in comparison to maybe how you would consider a brand and make a purchase based on your awareness and consideration of that brand — is pretty crazy.
Rob: Well, even my impulse buying has been outsourced by algorithms with zero-click buying. It's just everywhere.
Elena: I was thinking very similar to both of you. One was the Target experience. And I don't shop at Target like I used to, but back in the day people would talk a lot about how you go into Target and you walk out with all these things that you never even expected to get. I thought of that. And then also Amazon — I feel the same way. I do a lot of impulse buying on Amazon that you wouldn't even expect. So I agree — it has really changed that type of online shopping. So, okay.
Rob: I mean, there's a reason why Amazon and Jeff Bezos owns the world. When you have to go into a store and look around and walk down aisles and carry something around with you, there's just that added mental friction, right? Versus just a click and it's there.
Angela: Yeah. I do feel like those purchases, at least for me though, are sort of incremental to what I would've otherwise bought. My most recent example on TikTok Shop is a towel that perfectly fits my dog. If you have a dog and you get him out of the shower or the tub and you try to drape a towel over them and they shake it off — I'm like, "I don't really need that," but I needed it when I saw it. I wasn't gonna shop for it, right? It was like, "No, that's fine. I'll take that one."
Rob: The thing that Amazon does so well too is — I invent products all the time. I'm at the gym, and I'm like, "Why don't they make gym bags square, in the shape of a gym locker?" And then I go to Amazon, and someone already made it, and then I buy it, right? So it's like — you have an idea, you go there, and it's been invented.
Elena: What do you mean your gym bags are round? Like, I'm thinking of you walking in with, like, a circle.
Rob: Well, I mean, they're not square. They don't fit right into a gym locker. They don't insert, right? Like a gym locker — yeah. There's actually one that's got the shoulder strap and everything, but it's made exactly in the shape of a gym locker, and you slide it right in. And when you unzip it, it opens just like the gym locker does.
Elena: You know what? It's brilliant. Okay. That's genius. Yeah.
Rob: I had that idea, but — I was super happy someone actually invented it, 'cause then I could buy it.
Elena: Gosh. All right.
Angela: Well, thank goodness someone else had it before you, otherwise we wouldn't have had NuProb Rob.
Rob: If you steal from me, you've stolen twice.
Elena: Okay. I think that's a good place to wrap us up.
Episode 168
The Death of the Funnel
Concern about short-termism among marketers jumped from 25% in 2022 to 55% in 2025. Budget allocation barely moved. The funnel may not be dead, but it might be damaging your brand.
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob debate whether the marketing funnel still belongs in the boardroom. They unpack why the funnel persists despite strong evidence against it, how ad platforms reinforce flawed thinking for commercial reasons, and what alternatives actually work.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] Marketing Week research on why funnel reinvention is backfiring
• [02:00] The funnel as a mental shortcut vs. a map of how people actually buy
• [05:00] How ad platforms built funnel-stage products for commercial reasons
• [07:00] Categories where the funnel fits (and where it falls apart)
• [11:00] The say-do gap: marketers believe in brand investment but budgets barely moved
• [15:00] Tom Roach's alternative: building, nudging, and connecting
• [18:00] How to plan media without the funnel
• [20:00] What great creative looks like when you stop thinking in funnel stages
Resources:
2025 Marketing Week Article
Google Messy Middle Research
WARC Multiplier Effect Report
Thinkbox Profitability 2 Report
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
CMO
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
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Transcript
Elena: Hello, and welcome to "The Marketing Architects," a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the chief product architect of Misfits & Machines.
Angela: Hello.
Rob: Hello.
Elena: We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. Today, we're talking about the marketing funnel. Is it dead? Dying? Is it just misunderstood? Everyone from Google to Ehrenberg-Bass to the trade press has declared the traditional funnel is obsolete. But if we kill the funnel, what do we do instead? And does constantly reinventing it actually help marketers, or is it just making it harder to communicate our results? That is the topic for today, and I'm gonna kick us off, as I always do, with some research. This episode was inspired by a recent "Marketing Week" article by The Trade Desk's Reality Check column titled "Marketers' Constant Attempts to Reinvent the Funnel Are Losing Them Credibility." The article acknowledges the growing body of evidence that the traditional awareness-consideration-conversion funnel oversimplifies how people actually buy. Google released some research called the Messy Middle, and they show that buyers don't move linearly — they loop between exploring and evaluating in chaotic, unpredictable ways. And WARC's Multiplier Effect Report made the case that separating brand and performance into upper and lower funnel buckets is a false dichotomy. Thinkbox has also released research on this in their Profitability 2 report, showing that the media mix across categories is heavily biased towards short-term tactics, and therefore not optimized for ROI or profit. But this article argues that all this funnel reinvention is actually backfiring. The authors tested new frameworks with senior marketers, and the feedback was brutal. They said things like, "It's too complicated. If it takes more than a couple minutes to understand a chart, I've lost the executive." Another said that they could see pushback if they tried to replace the language of awareness, consideration, and conversion. So the evidence for rethinking the funnel is strong, but the marketing industry's habit of constantly replacing it with something more complex might hurt our credibility. Okay. Let's get into it. I thought we should just go ahead and start with the question everyone listening probably just wants to have answered: Is the Funnel Still a Relevant Framework?
Do we think the funnel is still a relevant framework for marketers? Why don't you kick us off, Ange?
Angela: Sure. I'm a fan of mental shortcuts, and I think the funnel is useful as a shortcut, but I think somewhere along the way, marketers started treating it as a map of how humans behave, and I think that's what this article speaks to, what you're speaking to, Elena. What the research shows across thousands of campaigns, millions of dollars in spend, many, many years, is that advertising works by shifting probabilities. Every time someone sees your brand, you're incrementally increasing the chance they'll choose you the next time they're buying in your category, and that happens very slowly across many years, mostly outside of any purchase moment. I think the funnel implies people are moving through stages with intention, and the reality is that most buying is very low involvement. It's very fast. It's habitual. People reach for what's familiar. The brands that end up winning are the ones with the strongest mental availability, meaning when a buying moment arrives, your brand is the one that comes to mind first. So the funnel doesn't really have a great mechanism for that. It's built around a rational, sequential buyer who in most categories simply doesn't exist. Rob is a funnel nightmare for a marketer. I don't know — are you really easy to shift? We're really easy to shift Rob's probability of purchase, but maybe not necessarily related to the brand. You were just trying to sell me on a —
Rob: I just —
Angela: $600,000 mattress. Yeah.
Rob: Gosh, yeah. I agree with you, Ange. You know, it's funny, I heard someone use this analogy once. The QWERTY keyboard, right? The QWERTY keyboard is really not optimal, right? But we've all sort of learned it. We all kind of use it. I mean, it's a framework. So from that standpoint, the funnel's relevant. But yeah, it's not exactly optimal.
Elena: I'm sorry, what's the QWERTY keyboard?
Rob: Oh, come on. Are you serious? I'd like you to look at your keyboard and read the top row of keys. See, this is a learning podcast. We're all learning here.
Elena: Okay — is that my keyboard?
Angela: You just made Rob's day.
Rob: If there was gonna be a highlight reel, can we please earmark that one?
Elena: Ange, did you know what that was?
Angela: It's not commonly referred to as that, I will give you that.
Elena: Never in my life have I heard that.
Rob: I'm old.
Angela: You are.
Rob: Clearly.
Elena: Okay, I'm sorry, Rob, I got so caught up in that, I wasn't really listening to what you said.
Angela: I have no idea what you said.
Rob: I'm used to not being listened to.
Elena: So you're saying it's not perfect, but it's what we have.
Rob: It's what we have, it's what we know. We sort of learned it, and it's useful because it's what we know.
Elena: Yeah. I would agree with you. I think that it's useful for teaching someone generally about how marketing could work. Where maybe it becomes not as useful is when you are truly planning all of your marketing decisions around a traditional funnel. And a lot of ad platforms have built their products around the funnel, so sometimes marketers are sort of forced into that thinking. Meta literally lets you optimize for awareness, consideration, or conversion, and a lot of the other similar platforms do the same.
How much do we think the funnel is surviving just because these platforms are sort of forcing it on marketers? I have a take on how much we're actually using the funnel a little later, just in terms of budgeting decisions and things like that. But, you know, platforms built funnel-stage optimization into their products because it sells more campaign types.
Angela: That's just a commercial decision dressed up as media science, and marketers accept it because the interface makes it feel sort of rigorous, I think. The deeper problem is that platforms control the measurement, and that measurement is built on last-touch attribution, meaning the platform gives credit to whatever touchpoint happened closest to purchase. So your paid search campaign looks brilliant, your television potentially looks weak, and the data confirms that you should shift more money towards search. But when we think about what econometric modeling shows consistently across categories, it's that a huge share of those search clicks exist because of the brand advertising that happened weeks or months earlier. The person typed your brand name into Google because something made your brand mentally available to them. The platform takes the credit for the click, the brand investment that caused the click potentially gets cut. So it's just a very expensive misreading of cause and effect. I think it can be really dangerous, these different campaign types in these platforms, and it's happening at enormous scale across the industry.
Rob: I think when it comes to something like Meta, it's not a funnel — it's a syringe, it's pumping cash right into the veins of Zuckerberg. It is just perfectly designed to make money for the connected platforms. I mean, it was like engineered. And why wouldn't they continue to build around that in their case studies and in their best practices? We already know the language, so it must be right, and that's why they make the money they do.
Elena: When I was prepping for this episode, one thing I was thinking of is — are there categories where the funnel actually does describe really well how people buy, and then are there others where it just naturally falls completely apart? What do we think?
Angela: Yeah, I mean, I think there are categories where there's maybe more relevance. High-consideration purchases would come to mind for me. Enterprise software, mortgages, a new car, something where a person likely spends weeks researching, involves multiple decision makers, goes through a genuine evaluation process. Even there, I'd say it describes a process more than it explains what advertising should do, but the shoe fits a little more in high consideration. Where it falls apart are categories like packaged goods — cereal, shampoo, beer. People buy those categories dozens of times, if not more, a year, quickly, with almost zero deliberation. They reach for a brand that comes to mind first or is just there on the shelf. Mental availability and physical availability are really important. That's Byron Sharp's framework at Ehrenberg-Bass, and the data behind that is super strong. The category I think that really illustrates a bit of a trap is the D2C world, right? They grew up in digital environments where every stage of the funnel was trackable, so it felt like validation. But where they were actually measuring was a very small population of highly activated buyers, while the much larger pool of potential customers stayed outside of their view. And so they optimized the funnel — quote unquote — "brilliantly" and hit a growth ceiling. And the lack of focus on reaching a broader audience fed into that problem, because they had insufficient reach, which is, as we know, a really important lever for growth.
Rob: Is it an oversimplification or overgeneralization to say that B2B tends to be better for the funnel than B2C?
Angela: Yeah, I mean, I think there's B2C that still has more of a funnel in terms of the customer journey that a consumer would go through. But I think it's fair that a lot of B2B SaaS, platform purchase decisions and things like that, are heavily researched. You're probably not being shopped if you're not one of the top five that that person knows about, so awareness is super important. There's not a lot of physical availability in the B2B world, which can make it hard — where top-of-funnel awareness matters more. So I could kind of go with you there.
Rob: In B2B, you tend to have a committee making a decision, so —
Elena: Yeah. What's crazy, though, is there's research that shows most B2B buying decisions still go with the first brand you had in mind. So even in B2B, it falls apart a little bit. Rob, what do you think? Did you have any categories in mind?
Rob: I was just asking. I thought the B2B thing — I mean, no. Well, I'm just learning like everyone else out there right now. I was even thinking about software as well, just SaaS — you can get caught up in the funnel pretty easily because you are doing research, you're trying to figure it out. And I think we've even seen in our own product experience when we were developing products ourselves. We've talked about it a million times, but like with Stuffies, where the funnel actually didn't work, right? Like, if we were going to sit here and go, "Okay, we're really building funnels for mom," we would've missed out on the real buyer — grandmas. So there are definitely cases in the consumer space where it can definitely go backwards on you.
Elena: Yeah. I was thinking the funnel can fall apart in any category, really, so pick your poison. Where I was trying to think of ones where it does apply well — I think it's almost categories where there's external pressure to go through the funnel. I was thinking about college admissions. Like, they always say, "Okay, you should look, become aware of a lot of different colleges, consider — you've gotta tour more than one." I was always told that. You can't just go with the first one you look at and then make the decision. Or wedding venues, same thing. And that could apply to B2B SaaS too, if you have to show everyone, "Hey, I went through this process." But you still might have something in mind that you know you're going to go with no matter what, and you just have to go through this sort of fake funnel in order to prove that the school you picked, or the venue, or the software, has actually been vetted when someone had something in mind all along.
Angela: Yeah. So high consideration is probably the common denominator, yes.
Elena: Um, well, one thing I was wondering about — Ange, there are a lot of articles out there. If you search "is the funnel dead" online, you can find a lot of commentary on it. Not hard to find an article to feature for this.
Do you think senior marketers at big brands are truly using the funnel as their primary marketing framework? Like, do we think this problem is maybe overblown? Are sophisticated marketers still relying on it?
Angela: Yeah. It's hard to know for sure what level of dependency they have, but I would say this: I think brands genuinely care about awareness. I think there are very few boardrooms in the United States or in the world where you've got a board saying awareness doesn't matter. But caring about awareness and making good investment decisions because of it are two very different things. WARC just published data — I think I saw it yesterday — showing concern about short-termism went from 25% of marketers in 2022 to 55% of marketers in 2025. So the worry is real and growing, and yet budget allocation barely moved in that same period. WARC calls that the say-do gap. And the reason it persists comes back to what we just said about attribution. When last touch gives all the credit to the bottom, brand investment becomes invisible in the quarterly numbers. So even marketers who intellectually believe in awareness end up systematically defunding it because the data that they're handed — or that they're pulling out of their attribution — tells them to. The funnel gives us this language for awareness, but I think marketers are having a hard time tying a measurement system to it that actually protects those funds.
Elena: Did you say the WARC data was, like, 20% to 50%?
Angela: 25% in 2022 to 55% in 2025.
Elena: Oh, sad. That is the wrong direction.
Angela: It is. What are we doing here? Yeah.
Elena: Not enough, clearly. Rob, what do you — oh wait, Rob, you don't need to say what you think about that for Ange.
Rob: Got it.
Elena: Yes. Sorry to scare you.
Rob: It's really hard going after Ange when she gives these —
Elena: I know.
Rob: Where she's so good — I'm just like, "Let me make a joke."
Elena: Um, okay.
Let's talk about what the real cost of this sort of thinking is. I'm excited for this question. Can we point to specific bad decisions that we think brands make because they're trapped by platforms or their own thinking around funnel stages?
Angela: Well, I was thinking about the creative brief, where maybe funnel thinking does its earliest consistent damage in a campaign. If a brand decides TV is an upper-funnel channel, that label can kind of shape the brief. So the brief says, "Build emotion, tell a story," and the agency delivers something that's cinematic and beautiful and completely impractical for the person who might be watching it. The problem there is that TV reaches everybody simultaneously — people who've never heard of you, people who bought last week, and people who are actively shopping right now and would respond to something clear and useful. Funnel thinking told you those people belong in a different channel, so your TV creative could potentially ignore them entirely. I think we've talked about this before. The best TV creative holds both jobs at once. It builds memory for that out-of-market viewer — the person that might be buying six months from now who needs your brand lodged in their head before that moment arrives — and it gives the in-market viewer something practical and actionable, with a clear offer, a simple CTA, a direct articulation of what you do. Campaigns with both emotional resonance and a clear call to action outperform purely emotional campaigns on both long and short-term metrics. Emotion makes you memorable. Clarity makes you useful. And the funnel, I think, convinced marketers that those two jobs belong in separate channels or at least separate creative briefs.
Rob: Is it too elementary at the end of the day to just say — looking at what the costs are — there are three big ones? Simplifying it: you ultimately starve the top to feed the bottom, right? And you're really paying through the nose to target people that are already interested in you, and you're continuing to battle finance with "are we doing short-term wins or long-term brand shrinkage?"
Angela: It's a good point, Rob. You're starving the top, but what that in turn does is starve the bottom eventually.
Rob: Right. Absolutely. But it feels like that's what you're doing — reallocating energy that isn't gonna deliver right away to hit that spreadsheet.
Elena: All right. So we've talked about, I think pretty thoroughly, the challenges with the traditional funnel, and we're not alone. The marketing industry also seems to broadly feel that the funnel is out of date. So instead, people have been proposing new models — things like the Messy Middle, fractals, flywheels, infinity loops. We love an infinity loop. And the senior marketers interviewed for the article I opened with said they felt these replacements were often too complex for the boardroom. So if the funnel is easy to understand, executives are more likely to lean into it. When people have been trying to use these more complicated models, they feel like they're going to lose the executives. Tom Roach, who has been one of the bigger critics of the funnel, actually agrees that we'd be, as he says, mad to try and kill it. Instead, he proposed a modified funnel that swaps awareness, consideration, and conversion for building, nudging, and connecting. So he's keeping the simple shape, but updating the thinking behind it. So what do we think?
Is there an alternative framework to the funnel that we like?
Angela: I think this is dependent upon the brand that you work for — at least for the marketing team internally. But if we're going to orient the board or the executive management team to a simple framework so that we have a common language and can keep the brand moving in the right direction in terms of what's ultimately gonna drive growth, I just come back to Binet and Field on the investment side. Long-term brand building and short-term activation work together, with roughly a 60/40 starting point as an anchor. And then Sharp on the audience side — reach as many buyers and potential buyers in your category as possible with creative that builds distinctive memory structures. Those two things together replace most of what the funnel is trying to do. Again, the marketing team can break that down and go, "Okay, do we want to stay with awareness, consideration, and ultimately conversion and intent, or do we move over to Tom Roach's model?" Specific to that brand. But I think the reason they've struggled to replace the funnel in boardrooms is measurement. Mental availability growing is a real thing with real business impact, but it's harder to put in a quarterly dashboard than a conversion rate. So the funnel wins on reportability. And until you have a measurement system that the board trusts — whether that's econometrics or incrementality testing — you'll keep defaulting back to the funnel because those are the metrics that show up cleanly in the numbers.
Rob: I totally agree with Roach. I think if you take a step back, we're all in the world of branding, and we've talked about on this podcast just how hard it is to create a brand, right? And the funnel is a brand, whether you like it or you don't. It's really hard to replace it. And if you're going to come in like a new CMO and go, "We just need a new logo, we need a new brand," we know that's just difficult, and there's so much equity in the funnel. But evolving the brand to start to mean something that's much clearer and more meaningful — I think that's spot on. I like Tom Roach's language — building, nudging, connecting. I think that's really easy to remember and feels more authentic to what we're trying to do. And poor Roach, man. If a guy needed rebranding himself — get a different last name.
Elena: Oh —
Angela: Oh, he's so distinctive.
Rob: You're either an insect or something that holds a joint. It's just not a fun last name to have. So we can cut that. I just thought I'd share. We're on the topic of branding. Saying the name Tom Roach is just — it sounds like a Marvel character.
Elena: Okay. Um, no, I think that's great. I think both of your perspectives could come together. I like Tom Roach's approach — it's almost like he's taking the funnel and making it a little more squishy, not so precise. And then Ange, I agree, eventually trying to move into more of the Binet and Field thinking — the long and the short — but that probably takes education and time, and it depends on your company's situation. If your brand's not doing well, probably not a great time to walk in and say, "We're not gonna report on conversion funnel numbers anymore."
Angela: Well, and too, to the point earlier — are we in a high-consideration sale, or are we buying toothpaste?
Elena: Exactly.
Angela: What are the things that really matter in terms of what's gonna drive growth?
Elena: Mm-hmm. Agreed. What about thinking about this from a media planning perspective, Ange?
If a brand came to us and said, "We want to try to move beyond funnel-based media planning," what would you tell them to do instead?
Angela: Yeah. Start with reach. The first question I think every brand should answer is: what's the share of the total category buying population that we've reached with the advertising we're doing — or have done in the last, say, 12 months? In most cases, I think that number is shockingly low. Brands spend enormous energy optimizing a small audience while the majority of potential buyers stay untouched. Once you know that number, the planning question becomes much clearer. How do we maximize reach across the full category with the right balance of brand building and short-term activation? The 60/40 is just an anchor for a starting point, but there's a lot of research to dig into. You can survey your own customer audiences as well to better understand what percent of that audience is shopping at any given time, to help inform what that media plan should look like. But I would say this too: before you get to redesigning the media plan, you need to rebuild the measurement system, because if you change your strategy but keep last-touch attribution as your reporting system, you're gonna recreate funnel logic regardless of what you call the new framework. The measurement is where the funnel actually lives. So fix that first, and the media plan becomes a much more honest — and a little easier to plan around — conversation.
Elena: Yeah, that's a good point — probably start with measurement first, and then figure out how to adjust our media. Um, Rob, Ange talked a bit earlier about how the funnel can affect our creative decisions, and one way it has is it's created this sort of artificial divide between your brand creative and your direct creative. So, what do you think great creative looks like when you stop thinking in these distinct funnel stages?
Rob: Yeah. I think to just acknowledge what you said there from a best-practices standpoint, it certainly makes sense that people are looking at where their ad is in the funnel, right? That's just nature. Maybe higher up in the funnel, you're going to lean a little more brand in nature. Lower in the funnel, you're gonna try to close the deal. That makes sense. But at the end of the day, and Ange said it well, we've always lived by the philosophy at Marketing Architects: remarkable work that works remarkably. So there's a job to be done here, and that job is twofold. One is to seed great distinctive assets into the minds of the consumer, build that mental availability. But we're also in advertising, and we are here to sell product at the end of the day. The agency that I started at many, many moons ago used the line, "Sales overnight, brand over time." And I thought that was smart then, it's smart now. That is the job we are trying to do at the end of the day, and that's the job your creative should be doing.
Elena: I do think it's smart to look at where an ad is landing in the funnel and whether someone is about to make a purchase, and adjust your creative accordingly. I also think you can go way too far with that sometimes — like, you don't necessarily always need to tell people over and over, "Buy this, buy this. Buy it now, buy it now." People aren't dumb. They're gonna know to click through and buy.
Rob: Absolutely. But it's still — even at the bottom of the funnel, even when you are asking for that sale, there's still a branding opportunity. That's where your distinctive assets can still live. And sometimes we just throw that stuff out because we're like, "Close the deal." But we're still borrowing that equity that we paid good money for higher up in the funnel. Let it work for you.
Elena: Yep. All right. Well, to wrap us up, when are you most likely to resort to impulse buying?
Angela: Yeah, I can jump in here. I mean, I just think for me the funnel kind of collapses in moments where physical availability really matters. I think about airports, gas stations. You know, I walk in probably not really needing anything, and I go from buying nothing to buying something I don't need in about 30 seconds. And the funnel really had pretty little to do with it. I purchased what was available and visible. Maybe brand preference played a role in what I grabbed, but what that situation really shows is how important physical availability is — not just being stocked and being there, but even things like shelf placement, proximity to the register, how convenient you can be inside of a convenience store. So that's where I think of it.
Rob: I definitely resort to impulse buying when I'm awake. You know, there's just so much goodness out there to be had, and in today's world it just keeps coming at us. I mean, Amazon — come on. How does it know what I want? You only push a button and it shows up at your door. It's like we are engineering a world where impulse buying is probably the primary mode of buying.
Angela: It's crazy how Amazon really disrupted physical availability. Because typically you think of an online purchase as not physically available, but the speed at which you can get it — and how you make buying decisions differently today based on that availability and speed to the front porch, in comparison to maybe how you would consider a brand and make a purchase based on your awareness and consideration of that brand — is pretty crazy.
Rob: Well, even my impulse buying has been outsourced by algorithms with zero-click buying. It's just everywhere.
Elena: I was thinking very similar to both of you. One was the Target experience. And I don't shop at Target like I used to, but back in the day people would talk a lot about how you go into Target and you walk out with all these things that you never even expected to get. I thought of that. And then also Amazon — I feel the same way. I do a lot of impulse buying on Amazon that you wouldn't even expect. So I agree — it has really changed that type of online shopping. So, okay.
Rob: I mean, there's a reason why Amazon and Jeff Bezos owns the world. When you have to go into a store and look around and walk down aisles and carry something around with you, there's just that added mental friction, right? Versus just a click and it's there.
Angela: Yeah. I do feel like those purchases, at least for me though, are sort of incremental to what I would've otherwise bought. My most recent example on TikTok Shop is a towel that perfectly fits my dog. If you have a dog and you get him out of the shower or the tub and you try to drape a towel over them and they shake it off — I'm like, "I don't really need that," but I needed it when I saw it. I wasn't gonna shop for it, right? It was like, "No, that's fine. I'll take that one."
Rob: The thing that Amazon does so well too is — I invent products all the time. I'm at the gym, and I'm like, "Why don't they make gym bags square, in the shape of a gym locker?" And then I go to Amazon, and someone already made it, and then I buy it, right? So it's like — you have an idea, you go there, and it's been invented.
Elena: What do you mean your gym bags are round? Like, I'm thinking of you walking in with, like, a circle.
Rob: Well, I mean, they're not square. They don't fit right into a gym locker. They don't insert, right? Like a gym locker — yeah. There's actually one that's got the shoulder strap and everything, but it's made exactly in the shape of a gym locker, and you slide it right in. And when you unzip it, it opens just like the gym locker does.
Elena: You know what? It's brilliant. Okay. That's genius. Yeah.
Rob: I had that idea, but — I was super happy someone actually invented it, 'cause then I could buy it.
Elena: Gosh. All right.
Angela: Well, thank goodness someone else had it before you, otherwise we wouldn't have had NuProb Rob.
Rob: If you steal from me, you've stolen twice.
Elena: Okay. I think that's a good place to wrap us up.