What did media heads find at the end of the marketing funnel in 2025?

2025 is being widely described as the year the traditional marketing funnel began to collapse, or at the very least, lose its linear shape. The year didn't exactly mirror how real consumers behave. Instead of moving predictably through neat stages, people flitted between discovery and purchase across platforms, devices, and contexts in ways that rendered traditional planning models obsolete. A single session could include a CTV ad, a creator reel, a product search, a marketplace review, and a purchase, sometimes in minutes. 

Research from industry studies this year points towards the shift that marketers increasingly struggle to make sense of sprawling data across channels, even as audiences behave in fluid, unpredictable ways.

According to a survey done this month of agency leaders, a large majority still find it difficult to pinpoint how each marketing channel contributes to business results, despite unprecedented access to analytics tools and measurement infrastructure.

Rohan Chincholi, Chief Digital Officer, Havas Media India, said, “The past year marked a decisive shift toward convergence across the media and marketing ecosystem.” He explained that this year, e-commerce scaled faster than expected, creators became distribution engines in their own right, and Connected TV pulled premium audiences into digital-first environments. But more importantly, campaigns began to be judged not only on short-term media outcomes, but on their ability to compound value across the journey.

Traditional boundaries between brand and performance, media and creative, and even planning and execution are disappearing. Integrated platforms and data are blurring where one stage begins and another ends.

Across agencies, Anil Suryavamshi, Vice President - Digital, Carat India, observed teams abandoning “fixed calendars” in favour of agile, outcome-driven planning cycles that react to real-time signals rather than fixed upper/mid/lower funnel definitions. In his words, “Brand leaders expect the same strategic discipline but need the agility to shift resources quickly based on fresh data. The focus is no longer dividing efforts between ‘awareness’ and ‘performance’ campaigns, but rather creating systems that engage the same customer multiple times across a complex journey, capturing demand at the exact moment it arises.”

Yet not all see this evolution as a collapse. Nikhil Rangnekar, CEO at MediaCircle, cautions against calling the funnel dead. 

“To me “Collapsing of the marketing funnel” seems to be a carefully crafted myth being propagated by certain sections of the media industry with vested interests,” he said. “This seems to be a ploy to get advertisers to spend more than required,” he added.

Rangnekar shared that while journeys are faster and more complex, the fundamental psychological stages of awareness and interest still exist. For him, what’s changing is how quickly consumers move through them, not that they disappear entirely.

Channels blend, roles blur

Once upon a time, social storytelling; search was intent; retail media delivered purchase outcomes. That clean distinction has all but evaporated in 2025.

Suryavamshi points to social media platforms acting like search engines, fulfilling discovery, comparison and customer support in the same session. “Social is no longer just for reach or brand-building, it’s a real-time demand engine,” he said.

Retail media, once seen as a conversion channel, now contributes to brand narratives on marketplaces through branded storefronts and immersive video content, blurring the line between brand and performance.

Meanwhile, with connected TV (CTV), planners now witness brand impact and measurable outcomes living side by side, even though measurement inconsistencies still challenge its standalone funnel claims.

This mash-up of channels is forcing a cultural shift. Agency org charts once rooted in creative, media and analytics siloes are evolving toward hybrid teams that “own the journey from signals to conversion,” as Suryavamshi explained.

Chincholi highlighted this trend too, saying agencies today are expected to be consulting partners that strategise and execute simultaneously, a shift from traditional segmented roles.

The real test of integration

If the funnel had truly “collapsed,” there wouldn’t just be talk, there would be measurement frameworks able to map that collapse end-to-end. 2025 saw significant strides here, but also exposed limits.

Chincholi pointed to blended MMM models, real-time incrementality testing, and unified measurement solutions that stitch together reach, overlap, frequency and sales, enabling planners to see journeys rather than isolated metrics.

Yet studies released this year show that marketers still struggle to determine true cross-channel impact, despite unprecedented access to analytics tools suggesting the promise of “unified measurement” remains a work in progress.

Rangnekar believes that measurement is “another black box that needs to be addressed at the industry level”. He highlighted that relying on siloed publisher studies or simplistic measurement can mislead brands.

He said, “The popular siloed BLS studies where publishers themselves conduct research cannot be an acceptable benchmark. Brand tracks with a right mix of offline and online respondents and right technologies/methodologies to administer the research need to be commissioned by every brand that is interested in measuring ROI.”

Budgets and the evidence of change

Where money moves also often reveals true strategy. In 2025, budgets shifted in telling ways.

Suryavamshi pointed out that spending decisively moved toward channels that could demonstrate quick, measurable outcomes, particularly retail media, search and performance video, all anchored in first-party data.

“The dominant mindset shifted to precision over scale, proof over promise, and payback over potential,” Suryavamshi said, pointing to an industry-wide urgency around accountability and near-term impact.

He shared that mid-funnel video emerged as a critical bridge between brand impact and direct response, while broad, unvalidated awareness campaigns were either scaled back or compressed into shorter, performance-adjacent bursts. Always-on branding, once a default line item, faced sharper scrutiny unless it could show a clear contribution to business outcomes.

Several pressures accelerated this reallocation. Declining returns from traditional upper-funnel tactics, combined with rising media costs, forced marketers to rethink efficiency. As a result, agile, outcome-based budgeting models gained ground, with frequent reforecasting and growing adoption of zero-based budgeting practices.

Access to richer first-party datasets and improved incrementality measurement further concentrated investment in channels that could demonstrate clear bottom-line impact. In practice, this meant budgets flowed toward platforms capable of linking exposure, engagement and conversion within a single measurement framework.

The goal is to deploy every rupee where it delivers the highest immediate and strategic value, ensuring marketing investments are both accountable and aggressively performance-driven. - Anil Suryavamshi

If 2025 was about questioning whether the funnel still holds, what follows may be even more disruptive. The next phase of change, experts argue, will be less about media strategy and more about how marketing organisations themselves are structured.

“The next wave of collapses is far more structural. The planner-buyer divide, the separation of brand and performance metrics, and the hard walls between creative, media, tech and commerce teams are all poised to fully disappear,” Chincholi said.

He shared that the next collapse will likely occur within talent roles, where planners and buyers merge into full-funnel strategists responsible for orchestrating outcomes rather than optimising line items. These hybrid teams will own the entire journey from signals to content to conversion, all supported by AI agents that automate channel execution so humans focus on decisions, not tasks.

With the funnel gone, the next collapse is organisational. 2025 didn’t just reshape media, it rewrote the operating system of marketing itself.

-Rohan Chincholi

Whether the industry calls it a collapse, convergence or compression, the direction is clear. Marketing is no longer organised around channels or stages, but around connected experiences, unified measurement and integrated teams, a reality that will continue to redefine how brands plan, spend and grow in the years ahead.