By Wes Maynard, Managing Director, The MTM Agency
The customer journey used to be relatively easy to draw, with awareness sitting at the top, consideration somewhere in the middle and conversion at the bottom of the funnel; different channels held responsibility for moving people along that route. Those days are well and truly over.
Consumers now discover, assess and buy in a tangle of overlapping moments rather than a neat, linear sequence. Take a shopper named Joe. He might first meet a brand through a creator on TikTok, then search for it through an LLM, ask Reddit for advice, read a few articles and compare opinions. Along the way he gets nudged by a paid ad or an affiliate link. After countless touchpoints, Joe has made an informed decision, and only then does he head to the website and get his debit card out.
The old sales funnel may once have worked for Joe, but it no longer reflects how he, or any of us, discovers and engages with brands of today. Agency structures were built around a linear journey, with channel-specific teams passing work down the line like a relay race. For a long time now, audiences have not been moving in a straight line, and the agency models built around that old rulebook will soon be running out of road.
The journey has no single route
Before buying, the average consumer now uses 3.6 platforms. A recent report from Rise at Seven tracked 9,000 customer journeys and 1.5 billion searches to find that out. Google took just 34.5 per cent of the search share analysed, while YouTube, TikTok and Instagram together took more than 60 per cent.
In other words, no single channel owns the journey, and ‘search’ is no longer synonymous with Google. Research and purchase increasingly happen in different places; brands that plan one channel at a time are only ever seeing a fraction of the bigger picture.
Most agencies are still built around separate disciplines: PR, creative, media, digital, social, paid, search, etc. But clients need the right expertise built around their objectives, not one channel dictating the answer, and those objectives are getting harder to hit.
Attest’s 2026 UK consumer research found that half of UK consumers describe their spending as “cautious” and 72 per cent say they’re likely to switch to cheaper brands to save some cash. When every pound is under a microscope, a brand must earn trust as well as attention, and no single channel can do both. A brief to drive sales might hide a brand problem, a trust problem, a search visibility problem and a creative problem all at once.
AI has made authenticity paramount
Of course, we cannot ignore the new layer that AI brings to the workplace. As a tool, AI has the potential to take the repetitive, admin-heavy work off our plate and free up time for creative thinking and human judgement. It’s crucial to keep in mind that efficiency shouldn’t just mean producing more, though.
Going back to Joe: he is surrounded by AI content in his life, and like the rest of us he can spot it a mile off; it’s becoming tired wallpaper that he scrolls straight past. When technology makes content more abundant and quicker, trust often becomes a scarce asset.
That’s why authenticity is king. AI models are prediction engines, pulled towards the average. Ask one for a random number between one and ten, and it will probably say seven, because that’s the most common answer; now imagine that tendency applied to your brand positioning.
The public is wary too: EY’s 2026 AI Sentiment Index found that 74 per cent of UK respondents had recently used AI, but only 14 per cent were comfortable with fully autonomous, agent-led systems. If AI can produce it in seconds, so can everyone else; distinctiveness comes from a human point of view.
The agency model needs to follow the audience
None of this means the traditional disciplines are disappearing; it simply means the walls between them need to come down. Creativity shouldn’t be a department you bring in once the strategy is signed off; it should shape how a problem is understood, which channels are used, and how an audience is reached.
Tomorrow’s leading agencies will organise around client objectives, not internal departments. Integration itself is no longer the differentiator; what really matters is the quality of the thinking and creativity that comes from bringing different specialists together around the same problem.
Strategists, creatives and specialists should work from the same research and the same idea from day one, producing stronger ideas shaped by different perspectives and built for an increasingly fragmented customer journey.
In my opinion, agencies still organised around channels will struggle to stay in business; those that come out on top will be the ones that know how to make that mix of expertise work. They’ll be equipped for what comes next; they’ll organise around client objectives, keep creativity running from brief to delivery and use the breadth of their teams to produce ideas that wouldn’t emerge from one discipline alone.
In this media landscape, consumers are constantly on the move, and agencies can’t afford to stay put.
