Client: The Trade Desk

Marketers live in a world where every day brings a new hot take on what's dead and what's next. The industry narrative is increasingly focused on 'reimagining' the funnel. Recent high-profile examples include Google’s ‘Decoding Decisions, Making Sense of the Messy Middle’ (2020) and earlier this year, ‘The Multiplier Effect’, from WARC – both of which received effusive praise at the time of publication.

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We partnered with The Trade Desk to invite marketers to consider that the model we really need to drive transformation and build credibility already exists and is hiding in plain sight. It’s called the standard funnel.

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The Trade Desk are strong advocates for a holistic approach to advertising planning and full funnel marketing. So, all the evidence presented by Profit Ability 2 and The Multiplier Effect is both compelling and on message. But, for us, it also raised questions. How would this land outside of the marketing bubble (i.e. in the boardroom) or with people tasked with making full funnel happen, out in the real world, in big client-side marketing organisations? So, we decided to ask them. 

We conducted a programme of in-depth interviews in EMEA, APAC and North America with senior marketers representing some of the world’s biggest brands including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Mars, Mondelez, Amazon and global agencies like WPP and UM. We also conducted an extensive literature review and presented them with the latest evidence and reinvented funnels (e.g. WARC’s Multiplier Effect). We asked them how useful these would be in getting things done in their business.

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We discovered:

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• The need for simple models that can support behaviour change and organisational transformation. When it comes to the practicalities of doing full funnel, the re-imagined funnels are just not fit for purpose. The design and language of the reimagined models betray a marketing industry that is still too focused on talking to itself. None of the senior marketers we spoke to could see these models working outside the marketing bubble.

• There are many reinvented funnels. They all look different. They all have their own language. But they all arise out of the same foundational error; conflating the funnel and real-world customer behaviour.

• That simple ‘upside down triangle’ is still the model that changemakers in the biggest global marketing businesses use to make full funnel happen. The power of the standard funnel lies in its simplicity and adaptability. It has multiple uses and applications. It is a tool for planning and measuring marketing activity. But it is also a management and communications tool used to align and incentivise diverse teams and stakeholders around tangible business outcomes.

​You can read our more in our Marketing Week column here.

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You can download the research here.

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