How do you adapt to the death of the marketing funnel? Or is it only mostly dead?

The marketing funnel has been around for 130 years. Ideally it provides a framework for brands to make a set of choices to drive the consumer’s journey in a logical, methodical path from attention to consideration to purchase to loyalty. But nothing is the same as it ever was in the marketing funnel path. How often does anyone today not simultaneously consume multiple media outlets (phone, laptop, TV, tablet, games)? And sure, you need to be aware of a product before you buy it, but how often do you see a brand today you’ve never heard of and have a “journey” of 90 seconds before you buy something?

If they gave out awards at Possible for “Most Outstanding Metaphor,” I’m going with Jordan Bitterman, a deeply experienced ad executive now leading marketing at MiQ, which uses – wait for it - AI and data analytics to optimize digital ad campaigns. Bitterman told me that the current state of media and marketing “is like the end of a Jewish wedding where the groom steps on the glass and it shatters into pieces.”

That isn’t the end of the marriage of course, but just the beginning. The industry today needs to pick through the fragments of metrics and methodologies that provide insight into consumer behavior with brands and put a coherent if previously unrecognizable construct in place to make it work. You may break glass along the way, but you also can’t afford not to.

Of course, relationships matter – but only trusted ones

You can’t build a moat on your own, especially in our vastly complex marketing ecosystem. Although trusted partners have always been a valued commodity, their importance is now paramount (no pun intended) in an age where so much technology lacks transparency and where we can’t even confidently believe the things we see with our own eyes.

As so many industry leaders told me at the conference, it’s not about who you know, it’s about how much those who know you trust you, your product or service, and your company.

No one is better at working in the personal relationship game than David Steinberg, the CEO of Zeta Global, one of the leading AI-native (yes, there it is again) marketing platforms. But Steinberg scoffs at the notion that any company’s success – which for Zeta includes nineteen consecutive quarters of beating Wall Street estimates - has anything to do with the quality of one’s conversational banter. Even Zeta’s most advanced tech – the Athena voice-activated marketing platform – can’t succeed without access to vital data from well-established partners.

In its own data cloud Zeta has collected over 550 million profiles from consumers who flow through their owned and operated platforms like DISQUS and LiveIntent. That data is not headed to the mainstream LLMs from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Steinberg takes considerable pride in the fact that Zeta licenses the most valued proprietary first party data from 51% of the Fortune 100 companies, data that will never be made available to broad-based LLMs but will only go to those platforms in which marketers can unhesitatingly entrust their most valued data.

Another CEO who gets the value of trusted partnerships is Adam Singolda, the CEO of Taboola. The publicly traded company has been around for ten years, earned nearly $2 billion of revenue in 2025 and is driving new market capabilities such as its Realize+ and Deeper Dive. As Singolda noted, his company “is trying to help advertisers reach 3 billion people around the web” and in doing so to support the “open web” ecosystem that battles for advertiser and publisher money outside of the walled gardens of Google, Meta, and streaming platforms from the major media companies. He rattled off the list of decade-long sales and distribution partnerships with Apple, NBC, Disney, Yahoo and others that would not have happened without a deep and enduring trust of his company.

This level of trust will not be an easy ask for a flood of the new AI-native platforms pouring into the market. As Lisa Utzschneider, the CEO of Integral Ad Science, told me, companies don’t want to work with a hundred different partners – they’re looking for their top two or three. It’s just too complicated and a waste of too many resources to do otherwise.

As Utzschneider told me, “IAS is in the business of trust.” The company acts as an objective third party to ensure brands that they will and effectively get what they paid for in digital advertising. IAS’s next horizon is what they call IAS Total TV, providing marketers detailed data on platforms, channels and programs on connected TV. She described the process of integration, with partners such as Disney, NBC, Paramount and Prime Video as “humbling” – and not a process easily replicated by startup AI companies.

Human content creators – and those that support them – are more essential than ever

For a content-native guy (me), it came as a breath of fresh air to spend time with a group of executives whose passion and commitment to human creativity provides a hopeful oasis in the AI-native marketing sea. The keys to success include building a powerful direct connection to audiences, producing distinctive and authentic content, and an openness to technology innovation without being a slave to it.

Dhar Mann has in eight years created a studio system for the 21^st century, with over 160 million followers and 65 billion views. As Mann told me, the company now operates a studio facility “the size of two football fields.” Mann insists that “we’re not in the business of optimizing for algorithms. We optimize for our audience. And our audience, since day one, has wanted heartfelt, emotionally charged, positive stories.” The company has built a business with north of $50 million in annual revenues through its powerful direct connection to its audiences and collaboration with a raft of independent content creators and global brands like the NFL, AT&T, and Meta.

Tim Huelskamp runs 1440, which provides nearly five million newsletter subscribers with a daily mix of intelligent, human produced content about news, science, finance and technology. Ads that cost $180 on 1440 in 2019 now can run $100K. Again, that direct connection to a loyal audience seeking distinctive content is working even in a swarm of disinformation all around us.

Of course, content executives like Mann and Huelskamp and the content creators in their orbits need the expertise of experienced marketing execs with a passion and commitment of their own to the centrality of creativity. Laura Desmond is the CEO of Smartly and a powerhouse marketing executive who told me that “70% of a brand’s impact comes from creative messaging, and 70% of a CMO’s time is spent on creative messaging, but 70% of the CMO’s budget is spent on performance marketing.” She sees Smartly as a tool to “unify creative data and audience data and workstreams to facilitate ‘intelligent creative’ – creative that is always learning, helping ads be more relevant and personal.” Better messages, better business.

And hopefully content creators and marketers are looking to passionate executives such as Marco Matos for guidance. Matos runs the social media-focused Adora and sees the flood of “AI marketers in a box” as unhelpful tools for the industry’s future. His content-centric vision – supported by the platform that he and his team have spent years building – is aimed at aligning CFOs, performance marketers and creative executives in a process that accelerates learning and market responsiveness at a much faster pace. It takes a village to dig a moat.