Omnichannel

How the collapse of the traditional consumer journey is reshaping media investment decisions and where budget should move

Media investment decisions now have to strike the right balance between brand awareness and intent conversion, and get out of the middle of the funnel.

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October 27, 2026 by John Nitti — Chief Business Officer, adMarketplace

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For decades, media planning was organized around a four-stage funnel: awareness, interest, consideration, and purchase. Each stage got its own line item, its own channel mix, and its own measurement plan.

That structure made sense when a purchase actually moved linearly through four separate stages, spread across days or weeks.

This legacy approach will prove challenging for a growing share of purchases in the AI era.

The change to the funnel

When a consumer asks an AI assistant for a design editing laptop under $1,000, the AI compares options, weighs specs against price, and recommends specific SKUs, all inside a single conversation. There's no separate visit to a review site, no scanning multiple links on a Google SERP, no waiting days to weigh options in between with multiple searches. Interest, consideration, and purchase now happen together, in that one conversation.

The funnel didn't disappear, it simply got compressed. Four stages are folding into two: brand awareness and intent conversion.

Brand awareness is still what it always was: making sure someone is familiar with the brand, product, or service before they start their purchase journey. This part of the funnel hasn't changed much, however, what has changed is how you generate this awareness and how the flow of the journey unfolds after this stage.

Intent conversion now covers what used to be three separate stages — generating interest, influencing consideration, and capturing purchase intent. Those stages may still exist in a consumer's mind, but they don't necessarily happen in separate, buyable media moments anymore and certainly not in a linear fashion.

Increasingly, they happen within the same environment, sometimes in the same conversation, and often before a consumer ever visits a website. A media plan still funding those three stages as if they're distinct moments is planning around a dated consumer journey. By the time a purchase happens, a lot of the deciding has already taken place somewhere else, inside a conversation or shopping environment that no media budget targeted or reached.

So where should that budget go to recapture that mindshare? Toward intent conversion, but that alone isn't the silver bullet. Simply moving the budget out of an old line item like "consideration" and into a bucket labeled "intent conversion," without changing how that money is spent, misses the actual shift in behavior.

Relevance not tied to a keyword

The fix is relevance, not just presence. That's a more evolved kind of targeting than traditional search advertising, which rewards matching what someone typed to a keyword. Intent conversion inside an AI conversation rewards matching a brand to the consumer's actual intent, whether that's comparing two options or checking if something fits the context of a specific need, in that moment.

That means relevance is no longer based on a keyword. Being inside the conversation is not the same as being the right answer in context: a brand that's simply present in an AI environment without being relevant to the intent is functionally invisible, no matter how much budget sits behind it.

That's a shift from being visible somewhere along the path to purchase to being contextually relevant within the conversation where the purchase decision is actually being made.

Another consideration is that early investment can matter more than waiting for scale; being a first mover is an advantage. While AI chat experiences within open web browsers and Buy Now Pay Later shopping apps are still relatively new surfaces, waiting for them to mature before investing means showing up after competitors have already built the relevance and presence that's hard to catch up on later.

The edge on a new surface tends to go to whoever arrives early, not whoever arrives with the most proof that it works (think of CPG's advantages in linear TV).

Planning for the AI era

There are three ways that budgets can begin to operationalize for media planning in the AI era.

1. Keep enough in brand awareness to stay on someone's radar before they start their purchase journey.
2. Consolidate what used to fund interest, consideration, and purchase separately into one intent conversion budget, and spend it on earning contextual relevance in the moment a decision is happening.
3. Move a portion of that budget into new surfaces early, before the cost of showing up there rises.

None of this changes the fundamentals. A consumer still has to go from finding out about a brand to buying from it.

What changed is the amount of steps in that journey, and how much time it takes. It used to take four steps, and for a growing share of purchases, it now takes two: get on someone's radar, then be the relevant answer when they're ready to decide.

Media investment decisions now have to strike the right balance between brand awareness and intent conversion, and get out of the middle of the funnel.

About John Nitti

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