99% Marketers Still Use Outdated Siloed Funnels, Do You Know The New Cross-Funnel Connection Growth Blueprint For AI-Era Marketing?

In May 2026, Google Marketing Live brought together global marketing leaders to discuss the rapidly shifting landscape of consumer discovery and purchase, with Google VP and GM of ads and commerce Vidhya Srinivasan outlining a clear reality: AI has transformed how consumers interact with brands, and the legacy playbooks that drove growth in past decades can no longer keep pace with modern shoppers who expect to shop both smart and fast. For years, marketers have accepted gaps between different stages of the consumer journey as an unavoidable part of strategy, but rising audience saturation and climbing customer acquisition costs have turned these gaps into a critical threat to sustainable growth. Today’s consumers move fluidly between discovery, consideration, and purchase, rather than following rigid, siloed funnel stages, making connected cross-funnel strategy not just a competitive advantage, but an urgent necessity for any brand that wants to capture new demand and scale in the AI era.

1. The Urgency of Cross-Funnel Connection in AI-Era Marketing

The core mission of advertising and commerce has not shifted amid the AI transformation: it still remains connecting people with the businesses that hold the answers, products, and inspiration they need.For generations, marketers operated under the assumption that an unavoidable trade-off existed between making smart, long-term strategic decisions and fast, short-term performance-focused decisions. That trade-off no longer holds up in the modern market. Today’s consumers combine the desire for informed, thoughtful purchasing with the expectation of seamless, fast access to the products they want, creating a non-linear journey that breaks the rules of the traditional siloed funnel. The social-first playbook that drove direct-to-consumer and retail growth over the last decade is no longer sufficient to address this shift. As audience saturation spikes and customer acquisition costs continue to climb across every industry, marketers are facing a performance problem that cannot be solved by simply bidding higher for existing demand. Even for teams that have mastered traditional SEM and search engine marketing, this challenge persists, and many teams struggle to see meaningful growth even with well-optimized SEM google campaigns. This reality leaves marketers trapped between two ineffective outcomes: continuing to pour budget into siloed performance marketing that only captures existing demand without growing the overall market for a brand’s products, or investing in disconnected brand building that cannot be tied back to measurable business results. The only way out of this trap is to build an end-to-end cross-funnel strategy that connects every stage of the consumer journey, turning early inspiration into measurable conversion and creating new demand rather than just competing for demand that already exists.

2. Re-framing Funnel Strategy: Moving Beyond Siloed Brand and Performance Marketing

For decades, mainstream marketing strategy has been built around a siloed model that frames brand marketing as a top-of-funnel activity focused exclusively on awareness, and performance marketing as a bottom-of-funnel activity focused exclusively on conversion and efficiency. This model has long treated brand building as an afterthought, with most organizations prioritizing short-term performance optimization and chasing efficiency at the expense of long-term demand creation. This approach is fundamentally broken in the modern marketing landscape, as demonstrated by legacy fashion brand Coach when it hit a critical inflection point in 2022 that exposed the full cost of a siloed strategy. Despite holding near-universal brand recognition after 85 years in business, Coach faced the daunting reality that a new generation of consumers did not feel the brand was designed for them. The diagnosis of the problem was clear: the brand was operating within a marketing model built entirely around optimizing performance, chasing efficiency, and rewarding existing customer loyalty, leaving the brand’s connection with new audiences as an afterthought. As Coach CMO Joon Silverstein famously noted, you cannot performance-market your way into relevance, because performance marketing merely reflects existing demand rather than creating new demand for your brand. To change its growth trajectory, Coach had to entirely reframe its funnel strategy, moving beyond the siloed separation of brand and performance marketing to build a new model where emotional relevance, not just chasing short-term efficiency, was the primary driver of growth. The core realization that emerged from this shift was that brand is no longer just the top of the funnel: brand is the entire funnel. 

3. Real-World Cases of Successful Cross-Funnel Conversion

Multiple leading brands across different industries have already delivered strong, measurable growth by implementing a connected cross-funnel strategy, offering clear blueprints for other organizations to follow. The most comprehensive example comes from Coach’s transformation to win over Gen Z consumers, after the brand reframed its funnel strategy around connected cross-funnel growth. Coach rewrote its strategic playbook around three core shifts: prioritizing relevance over loyalty to win a new generation of customers, generating desire rather than just chasing performance with the understanding that storytelling makes conversion more efficient, and leading with purpose instead of leading with product features and sales. To scale this approach globally, Coach leveraged YouTube as its strategic anchor, with the platform now representing nearly 50% of the brand’s total media investment, because YouTube offers a full-journey ecosystem where long-form storytelling, creator culture, and commerce intersect seamlessly. A powerful example of this new approach in action is Coach’s Explore Your Story campaign, which was developed in collaboration with Gen Z communities, leaning into the younger generation’s interest in storytelling and the written word. The brand paired its iconic Tabby bags with readable book charms, inviting Gen Z on a journey of self-discovery aligned with its “Courage to Be Real” campaign, and built a full content ecosystem around this narrative that started with long-form emotional films on YouTube, extended into real-world experiences, and then brought those experiences back to YouTube to create a continuous flywheel of engagement. Central to this strategy is treating creators as cultural collaborators rather than just a distribution channel, which is exemplified by Coach’s long-term partnership with creator and author Haley Pham, where the brand integrated itself into Pham’s personal milestones including her own book release, rather than forcing her to follow a rigid corporate content calendar. The results of this connected cross-funnel strategy were overwhelmingly strong: the Explore Your Story campaign earned over 15 million organic engagements and 450,000 user-generated posts, driving a 60% increase in global top-of-mind awareness among Gen Z and a sixfold increase in brand consideration. The Haley Pham partnership reached 4.7 million unique users, delivered double the retail benchmark for consideration lift, and achieved nearly 2X more efficient cost per lifted user. Overall, the strategy drove a 29% top-line growth for Coach and a step change in performance return on ad spend, proving that connected brand and performance efforts deliver better results than siloed strategies. Many brands new to cross-funnel strategy start by integrating their existing Google ads and SEM search advertising into a connected framework, and see immediate improvements over disjointed Google advertising efforts. Beyond Coach, three additional leading brands have delivered strong results using connected cross-funnel Demand Gen strategies. Travel lifestyle brand Away was trapped in a classic efficiency trap, where even optimized Search and Performance Max campaigns could not meet the company’s aggressive 2025 holiday growth goals using only legacy social and traditional performance channels. Away leveraged Demand Gen’s Creator partnerships boost to amplify high-quality creator videos directly from the creators’ own YouTube channels, turning trusted creator authenticity into a performance engine, and the strategy delivered a 78% jump in incremental sales, a 16% lift in brand searches, a 230% increase in engaged site visits, and a 140% increase in add-to-carts. Legacy automaker General Motors needed to move beyond linear TV to build long-term brand equity and drive immediate dealership foot traffic, so the company paired premium YouTube brand placements with conversion-focused Demand Gen campaigns to connect inspiration to in-store action across the full consumer journey. The strategy delivered a 3X return on investment across GM’s full portfolio of brands, and for Cadillac specifically, combining creator and branded assets doubled click-through rates and cut cost per impression in half compared to traditional brand ads alone. Challenger active gaming brand Nex Playground, which built an entirely new category of AI motion tracking active gaming, could not rely on existing search volume to drive growth, so the company used YouTube connected TV to build category awareness first, then deployed Demand Gen to retarget interested households with conversion ads powered by predictive AI. This connected strategy tripled Nex Playground’s year-over-year sales, was 14X more effective at converting families than the brand’s primary social channel, and generated site traffic that stayed on-site 5.5X longer than traffic from other channels.

4. AI-Powered Enabling Tools for End-to-End Cross-Funnel Connection and Attribution

The shift to connected cross-funnel marketing is made accessible by a new suite of AI-powered tools unveiled at the 2026 Google Marketing Live event, all built on Google’s Gemini foundation to enable end-to-end connection and accurate measurement across every stage of the consumer journey. First, Google has reinvented ad formats for AI Search, creating next-generation ads that act as helpful additions to a user’s search conversation, closing the gap between a person’s initial question and their final purchase, while making it easier for consumers to discover new brands along the way. These new ad formats are instantly tailored to a person’s unique query, offering more context to help people make faster, more informed purchasing decisions, and connect early intent directly to final conversion. For businesses looking to scale their reach across the full funnel, Google’s AI-powered campaigns like AI Max remain the best option to ensure businesses are part of the consumer conversation at every stage of the journey. These campaigns integrate seamlessly with existing search engine marketing setups, making it easy for teams familiar with SEM to upgrade their strategy without rebuilding their entire Google advertising stack. Google also introduced Ask Advisor, a new unified agent built with Gemini that spans across Google Ads, Google Analytics, Merchant Center, and Google Marketing Platform, acting as an always-on strategic partner for marketers that connects the dots across all Google products to help marketers save time and grow their business. Ask Advisor delivers proactive, personalized recommendations across Google’s full suite of tools to help marketers hit their business goals, eliminating the silos between different tools that made end-to-end cross-funnel management difficult in the past. Google is also reimagining Google Analytics 360 as a new command center for modern measurement, enabling marketers to better understand the full modern consumer journey across every touchpoint, which is critical for accurate attribution across the full cross-funnel strategy. For creative teams looking to scale high-quality cross-funnel creative, Google launched new features in Asset Studio that remove friction from the creative production process, by centralizing creative workflows and connecting popular design tools to the latest Gemini models. This allows marketers to turn existing brand guidelines into high-performing cross-funnel creative assets much faster than before, and Asset Studio can instantly generate a range of high-quality assets across different creative themes and asset types directly from a brand’s marketing brief, brand guidelines, and business goals, making it easy to scale creative for every stage of the funnel. On YouTube, Google is leveraging Gemini to make it easier for brands to discover and partner with creators, and has introduced new AI-powered ad formats to help brands connect with audiences at the right moment across the funnel, with new Demand Gen features that bring all cross-funnel opportunities together on YouTube to help brands win new customers across the full journey. For commerce brands, Google is continuing to advance the agentic commerce era, building on foundational protocols including the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), and the new Universal Cart. Google is expanding UCP to new verticals and bringing new UCP capabilities to more users on Google, and has introduced new tools and data attributes to help products show up and get discovered across conversational AI surfaces, connecting early discovery in conversational AI directly to final purchase across the full cross-funnel journey.

5. Actionable Strategic Shifts for Marketers to Build Cross-Funnel Capability

For marketers looking to build their own cross-funnel capability to drive sustainable growth, there are clear actionable strategic shifts that can be implemented based on lessons from successful brands and new AI-enabled tools. Whether you are just getting started with SEM search advertising or looking to scale a mature SEM google portfolio, professional support can streamline your cross-funnel execution. To effectively implement these strategic shifts and optimize the full cross-funnel advertising process to achieve more ideal business results, marketers can obtain professional Google Ads related services from Topkee, which provides one-stop online advertising services based on Google ads that are suitable for both small businesses and large companies, covering a full range of services including comprehensive website assessment and SEO optimization, TTO tool initialization, customized TM customer tracking, professional marketing activity theme proposal, in-depth keyword research, AI-powered graphic and text creative production, attribution-based personalized remarketing strategy, and regular advertising report analysis, supporting all common types of Google ads including YouTube ads to help marketers improve advertising ROI, increase potential customers and boost overall sales growth, along with all core formats of SEM and search engine marketing to ensure every stage of your funnel is aligned for growth. The first core shift is to move from prioritizing existing customer loyalty to prioritizing relevance for new audiences, to win over generations of customers that have not yet connected with your brand. For too long, siloed marketing strategies have focused on rewarding existing loyal customers, which leaves brands stagnant and unable to grow their audience among new consumer groups that are critical for long-term expansion. By shifting focus to building relevance among audiences that have not yet engaged with your brand, you can create new demand that extends your business growth beyond your existing customer base. The second core shift is to move from just chasing short-term performance to proactively generating desire through storytelling. As past brand transformation demonstrates, performance marketing only reflects existing demand, it cannot create new demand. By investing in storytelling that builds emotional connection with consumers, you actually make conversion more efficient over the long term, because you have created the desire that will eventually drive conversion. The third core shift is to lead with brand purpose instead of leading with product features and sales. Consumers today connect with brands that stand for something beyond just selling products, so building your cross-funnel strategy around a clear purpose that resonates with your target audience creates deeper emotional connection that drives both brand loyalty and conversion. For marketers leveraging Demand Gen as part of your cross-funnel strategy, there are three additional actionable shifts to implement. The first of these shifts is to boost creator content for action, moving beyond treating creator partnerships as just a brand awareness activity. By using the Creator partnerships boost tool in Demand Gen, you can amplify authentic third-party creator content as performance assets, turning trusted creator voices into a driver of incremental sales and stronger site intent, while reaching unique audiences that are difficult to access through traditional ad channels. The second actionable shift is to connect inspiration to action, by modernizing traditional brand models that separate broad storytelling from conversion. Too many traditional brand strategies stop at building awareness, without linking that awareness directly to clear conversion paths. By bridging the gap between inspiration and conversion, you can turn purposeful viewing and brand storytelling into measurable outcomes like lead generation, site traffic, and sales. The third actionable shift for brands is to build your own category proactively, instead of waiting for consumers to find you through existing search demand. This is especially critical for new brands or brands launching entirely new product categories, where existing search volume is low. By leveraging AI-powered relevance to proactively introduce your brand to your next-best customers, you can create new demand and drive those customers toward a purchase, rather than being stuck competing for the small pool of existing demand. Beyond these strategic shifts, brands should leverage YouTube as a strategic anchor for their cross-funnel strategy, as YouTube offers a full-journey ecosystem that connects long-form storytelling for brand building through to conversion-focused Demand Gen campaigns, allowing brands to turn cultural relevance into consistent, sustainable business growth that can be further optimized with data-driven adjustment and professional advertising management support. For brands that prioritize high-performing Google ads, this aligned cross-funnel approach outperforms disjointed SEM search advertising by a wide margin, according to industry marketing data.

Conclusion

The shift to connected cross-funnel marketing in the AI era is no longer an optional strategic upgrade, it is a necessity for brands that want to break through performance ceilings and drive sustainable long-term growth. For decades, siloed brand and performance marketing forced marketers to choose between long-term brand building and short-term performance results, but the new generation of AI-powered tools and the proven success of real-world brands from legacy fashion houses to new challenger brands proves that brand and performance do not need to be competing priorities. When brands connect every stage of the consumer journey, building emotional relevance and purpose at the early stages of discovery and connecting that inspiration directly to conversion at the end of the journey, they can create new demand instead of just competing for existing demand, delivering both stronger brand outcomes and better performance results than siloed strategies ever could. With Gemini-powered tools making end-to-end cross-funnel management and measurement more accessible than ever before, what was once a distant strategic vision is now within reach for brands of all sizes. Even small businesses with limited budgets can leverage SEM google and optimized Google advertising to test connected cross-funnel strategies and start driving new demand quickly. If you are looking to tailor a cross-funnel strategy to your brand’s unique goals and market context, you are encouraged to consult with experienced professional marketing advisors to build a customized approach that aligns with your long-term business needs.

Appendix

1. Google Marketing Live 2026: What’s next for marketers
2. How Coach transformed legacy brand awareness into Gen Z relevance
3. How leading brands break the performance ceiling with Demand Gen