How brands can abandon traditional models and build intelligent, connected ecosystems to learn from every unpredictable bounce of the modern consumer journey
Lauren Wetzel
Global President, Data and Technology Solutions, WPP
For decades, marketers have relied on a comforting mental model: the marketing funnel. They’ve strategised and executed around the idea that a consumer will move neatly from awareness to consideration, then to purchase and loyalty.
But the funnel was built for a different world. Today, media is everywhere and in everything and consumers ricochet across channels, devices, communities and the physical world. Consumers don’t flow through a funnel. They bounce around like a ball in a pinball machine.
Imagine someone is buying running shoes. They might watch a creator on TikTok, ask AI for a recommendation, search Google, visit Reddit, browse Amazon, and walk into a store to try different fits.
Then they forget about it.
A few days or weeks later, a friend’s Strava post reignites the desire. They watch YouTube reviews before eventually purchasing through the brand’s app.
None of those interactions happen in a neat, logical order. Some happen simultaneously, some repeatedly, and some aren’t even measurable. At first glance, the journey appears random and messy. But each interaction informs the next.
After reading Reddit, the consumer searches differently. After chatting with AI, their consideration set narrows. After watching their favourite creators, they build brand affinity or become more price sensitive.
Each bounce creates new context for the consumer. The question for marketers is whether they are learning at the same pace.
Traditional campaign planning feels too rigid for how people make decisions today. A marketer’s job is no longer simply to guide a consumer along a well-defined path. It is to understand and respond to an ever-changing one.
The problem isn’t marketers, it’s the operating model playing catch up with consumer behaviour. Most companies still work in silos: CRM owns email, media owns paid, commerce owns retail, fragmented data sits across all of them, and measurement is an afterthought.
Each team optimises against its own goals and KPIs. Meanwhile, consumers experience one brand. It’s the equivalent of trying to improve a pinball score by controlling only one bumper.
When teams operate in isolation, the organisations may optimise individual channels, but it cannot improve the connected experience. The opportunity is not to control every bounce. It is to ensure that every part of the organisation can learn from it.
Marketing, pinball machines and rainforests might seem like an odd combination but stay with me.
The pinball machine describes how consumer behaviour has changed. The rainforest explains how organisations need to respond.
In a rainforest, nothing happens independently. Plants, animals, rain, light, and rivers each play a role in keeping the ecosystem growing. Its health comes not from the strength of one component, but from the connections between them.
Modern marketing works in the same way. Media influences commerce. Commerce creates first-party data. Retail data improves creative. Creative changes search behaviour. AI agents learn from all of it.
If the consumer journey behaves like a pinball machine, the marketing organisation needs to operate more like a rainforest: connected, responsive and able to learn as a whole.
Competitive advantage does not come from owning the biggest dataset. It comes from connecting the ecosystem, so signals become intelligence.
Most companies already have access to more data than they can make sense of.
The challenge is connecting the right signals across media, commerce, measurement, customer service, creators, partners, models and agents, then making the resulting intelligence usable throughout the organisation.
Every interaction should make the next interaction smarter and more relevant.
The faster this intelligence can be applied, the faster the organisation can learn and adapt.
AI is putting the pinball machine into hyperdrive.
Consumers are increasingly asking AI what to buy, which brands to trust and how products compare before they interact with brands. AI agents shopping on our behalf may soon become commonplace.
AI does not simply accelerate the consumer journey. It increasingly mediates it.
At the same time, AI gives marketing teams the ability to process more signals, identify patterns faster and respond with greater relevance.
But AI is only as effective as the intelligence available to it. Brands need systems that can learn continuously and adapt in real-time, not campaigns built around stages that no longer reflect how people behave.
Winning organisations no longer obsess over channels in isolation. They obsess over intelligence.
They ask:
Answering those questions requires connected data, interoperable systems, decentralised data collaboration and AI agents that can put intelligence to work across planning, creative, media, commerce and production.
Humans remain responsible for strategy, creativity and judgement, while agents help teams execute, optimise and learn at speed. Insight informs activation. Activation improves creative. Creative drives performance. Performance feeds back into strategy.
The funnel encouraged marketers to optimise for stages. The pinball machine requires them to learn from every bounce.
The brands that grow won’t focus on being the ones shouting the loudest at each interaction. They will be the ones learning the fastest. They won’t build better funnels, they’ll build intelligent, connected ecosystems that adapt continuously and make every subsequent decision smarter.
The consumer journey may never become neat or predictable again. Marketing doesn’t need it to.