Let’s be honest.
Most marketing strategies today are written for rooms, not results.
We spend weeks crafting neat narratives in fancy fonts to convince execs and clients we’ve got it all figured out. Top-funnel, mid-funnel, bottom-funnel. Awareness, consideration, conversion. Beautifully packaged, confidently presented. Throw in a few icons, a funnel diagram that looks suspiciously like the one from 2012, and voilà, “the plan.”
Let’s get real. Your perfectly symmetrical funnel doesn’t reflect how anyone actually buys. People don’t move through your “customer journey” like obedient little pixels. They jump around, pause, restart, forget, and remember again six months later because of a random Instagram Reel.
By then, your attribution model is confused. And your strategy? Off pretending it worked exactly as planned.
Spoiler, it didn’t.
Let’s call it what it really is, marketing theatre. The Funnel is Dead
And that’s the uncomfortable truth. We don’t write strategies to work. We write them to impress rooms. 45-minute decks filled with buzzwords like “omni-channel presence,” “customer-centric AI driven journeys,” and “holistic strategy.” Honestly, I dare you to explain any of them clearly.
AI is here. Not coming. Not maybe. Not “being explored.” It’s already writing headlines, resizing creatives, generating media plans, and auto-optimising budgets faster than your client can ask, “but can we get more impressions?”
However, AI still needs inputs. And right now, we’re feeding it broken ones. If you feed AI the wrong metrics, it will deliver those bad metrics perfectly. If you feed it outdated funnel logic, you’ll just get outdated results faster.
We’re handing our strategies to AI-powered platforms expecting them to follow instructions that barely make sense in the real world. AI doesn’t need better prompts. It needs better logic. And that logic has to be built around systems, not static plans.
Goodbye Funnels. Hello Feedback Loops.
This isn’t about throwing strategy out the window. Strategy still matters. But the way we build and apply strategy needs to evolve. Massively.
Right now we treat strategy like sculpture. Chip away, shape it, present it, then walk away until next quarter. What we actually need is strategy that behaves like a system.
Think about your most effective campaigns. The ones that got better over time and outperformed benchmarks week after week. I’d bet they weren’t the ones where the PowerPoint was flawless.
They were the ones where the feedback loop was fast. Where the team adjusted quickly. Where the creative got better. Where the system learned.
That’s the shift. We need to stop setting and measuring, and Start designing and responding.
If your strategy doesn’t include a real-time feedback mechanism, it’s not a strategy. It’s hope, disguised as a PowerPoint.
We don’t need more marketing managers. We need marketing engineers, people who can:
- Test continuously
- Adapt in real-time
- React to behavior, not assumptions
- Scale what’s working, kill what’s not, fast
CMOs of the Future Won’t Build Teams. They’ll Design Systems and Agents.
OpenAI, Zapier, Replit, n8n – these tools aren’t “trendy.” They’re the new talent and in the near future, CMOs won’t manage departments. They’ll design intelligent growth systems.
They’ll behave more like CTOs. Not approving every headline or CTA, but defining architecture, choosing agents, building loops.
Because today, one skilled marketer can fill five roles all they from designing creative to campaign launch. That’s not in the future. This is today’s reality
And yet most organisations still operate like it’s 2015. The ones who evolve will ask:
- What agents do we need in our stack?
- What data is fuelling our loop?
- How do we scale without adding headcount?
Agencies that adapt will thrive. Agencies that don’t? You’ll be managing someone else’s GPT agent while pretending it’s “collaboration.”
A Real Shift Starts With Letting Go of Control (And Why You Need To)
The scary part is that marketers love control. We believe that with the right plan, we can predict outcomes. But control is an illusion.
You can’t predict which creative will land next week. You can’t plan your way to a viral hook. You can’t guarantee that your “big idea” will outperform your test ad. The only thing you can control is the system you build.
If your system can learn, adapt, and scale on its own, you don’t need to hold onto control.
You just need to observe, adjust, and feed it better inputs.
Yes, sometimes your AI-driven system will deliver something weird. And yes, sometimes that weird thing will outperform your hero creative. That’s not failure. That’s feedback.
And that’s not chaos. That’s performance.
I get it, big ideas are nice, but you need specifics.
- Delete your quarterly funnel deck. (Yes, right now. I’ll wait.)
- Replace it with weekly, or daily, learning roadmaps
- Launch smaller, faster campaigns and start building feedback loops.
- Hire marketers who manage tools and automation, not just build slides
- Focus less on attribution. Focus more on system intelligence
Because the marketers who win over the next 5 years won’t be the ones with the most awards or the best relationships.
They’ll be the ones who learned how to build systems that could grow without them.
This Isn’t a Trend. It’s a Shift in Mindset.
It’s about rethinking how marketing even works. It’s about recognising that real growth doesn’t come from perfect planning. It comes from constant adaptation, relentless curiosity, and the guts to trust intelligent systems to do their job.
The Bottom Line is that
Marketing isn’t theatre anymore. It’s engineering.
If you’re still clinging to your funnel, you’re basically holding onto your Blockbuster card in the Netflix era. Sure, nostalgia feels safe. But growth feels better.
You don’t need a better strategy. You need a smarter system. And the nerve to trust it. Forget funnels. Forget decks.
Build systems that outlearn your competitors, and maybe even you.
By Fadi Sader, Head of Growth and Performance Marketing, Fusion5
