Reporting live from the floor at PI LIVE 2026, the energy in the room for Lauren Ingram's session, "The End of the Funnel: Marketing’s Biggest Shift Since Google", is absolutely palpable.
For over a quarter of a century, digital marketing has relied on a single, predictable shape. We all know it well: awareness at the top, conversion at the bottom, and a straight line in between. Today, that shape was officially declared dead.
Consumers no longer follow a neat path. Instead, they bounce across a scattered ecosystem of creators, communities, algorithms, and large language models, often making decisions without ever touching a brand’s own website. As the keynote made clear, this is not a mere channel shift. It is a structural collapse of a 25-year-old model of how growth happens.
