The combination of social media and artificial intelligence agents has broken down the consumer purchase funnel, and those changes demand new approaches, said marketers at The Brand Innovators New Rules of Consumer Connection Summit.
Brands need to show up consistently and constantly, whether it is maintaining connections with sports fans off-season or tending relationships with partners over years, said speakers
From left to right: Ed Pilkington, chief marketing & innovation officer of Diageo; Jordan Piqué, VP, Client Partnerships, GSTV
Marketers need to stay curious, and keep challenging the perceived wisdom, said Ed Pilkington, chief marketing & innovation officer of Diageo, which hosted the event.
“Just keep going back to challenge yourself,” Pilkington told marketers. He told a story about his early experiences at Diageo, when there was “lots of doom and gloom about the alcohol market.” He was often approached at functions by other professionals ready to talk about the slump in the market “with a drink in their hand.”
The data showed some 50% to 60% of the drinking-age population still drink spirits, but the insight was that attitudes have changed, said Pilkington. Consumers are accessing the category for different occasions and consuming different things, so plans had to change.
Brands can’t keep doing the same thing, he said: “It’s a changing world.”
From left to right: Casey Hurbis, chief marketing officer of BetMGM; Jay Fittipaldi, Head of Product Innovation, SAMY
Rethink the funnel
Social commerce and artificial intelligence agents are re-engineering the consumer purchase funnel, and marketers will have to adapt to that evolution, said speakers. “We’re at another inflection moment in e-comm in marketing and advertising,” said Casey Hurbis, chief marketing officer of BetMGM.
The places where purchases are decided and the speed at which they are carried out are getting both faster and more fragmented, as well as largely out of the marketers’ control, speakers said.
From left to right: Bruce Bundrant, Chief Commercial Officer, rEvolution; Colleen Campbell, vice president of client partnerships at Ibotta; Alexandra Von Puttkamer, Global Head of Account Management and Growth, SAMY
“We’ve entered the smart shopper economy,” said Colleen Campbell, vice president of client partnerships at Ibotta. Consumers have more tools available, so brands need to figure out how to reach them in a way that’s cohesive and consistent, she said.
“Consumers are really shifting how they discover brands,” said Jason Acker, vice president, NA media & digital at Diageo. “We need to be ready for the shortcut they are going to take.”
Marketers have to adapt and make sure brands are creating content that shows up in social platforms but also when large language models are searching because “that’s where consumer attention is,” Acker said. “We have a second audience, which is LLMs,” said Alexandra Von Puttkamer, global head of account management and growth at SAMY.
Marketers will need to understand how to market to AI agents and how to make their content convert at earlier stages of the journey, because it will move faster, said Edlynne Laryea, managing director, consumer packaged goods and restaurants at Meta. Adam Polansky, Director, global brand strategy & innovation at Mastercard noted AI agents will be able to make payments independently soon.
The 5 Ps of marketing are being replaced by a new consumer framework of 4S behavior: streaming, scrolling, searching or shopping, said Elizabeth Del Valle, global partner marketing lead at YouTube. Decisions used to happen in a storefront, but now “they happen in a single scroll,” she said.
“People are buying things really, really quickly,” so marketers have to rethink how their assets play into the funnel, Laryea said. As AI-enabled discovery grows, brands need to think about content ephemerally and consider where consumers will go to look for it.
“It isn’t necessary about flooding the zone with content, but it’s content that is seen as valuable,” she said.
Karen Harris, SVP of marketing for Tequila and Mezcal at Diageo
The end of virality
Content and cultural connection is evolving from a chase for viral moments to continued relationships, whether it is appealing across passion points – efforts to target gamers by their music, or combine sports and food – or keeping in touch with fans through the off-season, said speakers.
“Repetition builds reputation,” said Karen Harris, SVP of marketing for Tequila and Mezcal at Diageo. Cultural relevance is built by showing up meaningfully time after time in consumers’ lives, she said.
“It can’t be those macro moments in the year,” said Harris. “You have to participate at scale over and over again.”
Sports marketers, who have defined seasons and events, still need to take a year-round approach. The off-season is the perfect opportunity to decide how to tell stories, collaborate and work with partners and athletes, as opposed to a more transactional relationship, said Paul Beckles, vice president & general manager at Boardroom.
“If you only show up in the Super Bowl, People are: ‘Where were you?’” said Cheryl Mark, senior vice president, integrated business lead at The Team. When the season goes dark is the most important time to keep communicating, she said: “It’s not like they stop being a fan.”
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is going to put a number of these ideas of fandom to the test, said speakers. Abhijit Shome, vice president of marketing at Major League Soccer said the league is planning to keep the momentum going, especially as it shifts from a European focus to a more global approach next year.
The MLS platform has to be available to parents, players and fans all year-round, Shome said. It’s important to have continuity, and know what partners are doing when the sport is off the air and how it all integrates once the season starts again, he explained.
“It’s really thinking long haul, the bigger—picture play,” he said. He noted how MLS’s three-way partnership with Walmart Apple included products and shifting game days to accommodate the partners.
From left to right: Jake Avdiev, Head of Consumer Marketing & Strategy at Amazon Grocery; Juliette Whitten, Marketing Director – OREO Platforms, Mondelēz International; Anne Hill, VP, Food, Fetch
“We all have a role to play”
All these evolutions will require marketers to adapt their work styles and organizational structures, speakers said. They will have to become more open to taking risks and give up some control to users and creators, marketers said.
Having a full-funnel approach is still important for brands, but so is knowing where to focus to drive incremental sales, said Jake Avdiev, head of consumer marketing & strategy at Amazon Grocery.
“Testing and learning is a massive, massive skill that is necessary,” he said. Just because data seems to point to a trend, it doesn’t mean another part of the marketing team won’t have a different take on those same numbers, he noted. “How do you go from numbers on the page to the a-ha moment,” is still a challenge, so it’s important to bring cross-functional partners along for the ride to bring in those different viewpoints, he said.
All the marketing disciplines and channels need to work together as a well-connected team, said Von Puttkamer, comparing it to a solar system. “Each planet has to own its own thing, but exist around a center of gravity,” she said. “We all have a role to play.”
Thanks to AI, marketers are able to parse more data for insights, but they need to treat them as guideposts and not hard-and-fast rules, said speakers.
“Data should be a constellation, not a star,” said Juliette Whitten, marketing director, OREO Platforms at Mondelēz International. For example, she recalled when launching gluten-free Oreos, the data showed Mondelēz the audience was people with celiac disease, a limited market; but if the targeting also expanded to include hosts who want to be inclusive of their guests, it was a viable market.
Christine Hasbun, vice president of consumer planning at Diageo
“Insights is the magical thing that happens very rarely when you’re able to connect the dots,” said Christine Hasbun, vice president of consumer planning at Diageo. If data is not useful, marketers need to “deprioritize it,” she said, taking signals and contrasting them to other sources to identify “something that is surprising, but makes so much sense.”
There is still a place for taking risks, said speakers. In a world that feels divided and fractured, marketers are falling back on telling stories that are safe, but “we need to focus on making people care and making people miss us if we don’t show up in their feeds,” said Roderick Blaylock, vice president of marketing, Casamigos at Diageo.
“I still believe it’s art, science and courage,” said BET MGM’s Hurbis. “We’re not curing cancer here. Let’s try new things.”
