At Cannes 2026, Digitas argued channel planning is dead and brands should build networked experiences for a fluid funnel. The point is not that the funnel vanished, it is that buying behaviour moves faster than most teams are structured to follow.
The customer stopped moving in a straight line years ago. Most teams are still planning as if they did.
Channel planning is dead, according to Digitas' Liane Nadeau, speaking at Cannes Lions 2026. Her argument is that brands should stop planning by channel or tactic and start building networked experiences that meet people wherever they are. The awareness to consideration to conversion funnel has not disappeared. It has just started moving faster than the org chart can keep up with.
That last part is the real point. The funnel is fine as a way to think about how people buy. The problem is that most marketing teams are still built as separate channel silos, each optimising its own slice, while the customer moves across all of them in minutes. The structure lags the behaviour.
Why it matters
For Australian marketers this is less about a buzzword and more about how you are organised. If your paid search person, your social person and your email person each run their own plan and never share a view of the customer, you are optimising fragments while the buyer experiences the whole. The businesses that win are the ones treating the journey as one connected thing, not a relay race between departments.
The classic funnel stages still describe how people buy. What changed is the speed they move through them
What to do about it
The funnel still works as a map, and the businesses that reorganise around how people actually move through it will spend smarter than the ones defending their silos.