• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 2, 2025

Mastering omnichannel strategies has required marketers to grasp that golden ring, but many marketing departments — search, social and programmatic — were not designed that way from the start, which has become a roadblock on the road to a true omnichannel approach.

“The consumer journey is no longer a funnel -- it’s a pinball machine,” said Melissa Sierra, executive vice president of media integration at U.S. International Media, before introducing the MediaPost panel at the Performance Marketing Insider Summit on Monday.

Challenges in omnichannel strategies are focused around access to data and outdated organizational structures.

First-party data can help, but for CPG companies like Coca-Cola, which serves “10,000 Coca-Colas every second,” the omnichannel strategy becomes difficult, said Dylan Floyd, senior manager of end-to-end connections and media at Coca-Cola.

She said it’s difficult to collect all that first-party data or implement mechanisms at hotels or retail giants, and then analyze all of it. The cost to fill the gaps would be so “astronomical” it wouldn’t make sense.

Floyd also talked about working with influencers outside of social channels, but when asked by a Summit attendee about AI-generated influencers, Floyd questioned the authenticity of the strategy, although it lowers production costs.

“I have not partnered with AI influencers,” she said, adding that Gen Z believes authenticity is important. "[Asking if] you [can] deliver authenticity with AI-generated influencers is [just one] of the conversations we’re having today. The relationship we have with our influencers is just as important as the content output.”

Consumers use multiple channels to browse and shop, but organizational structures for many brands and agencies fall flat.

“The AI buzzword lets us get there quickly, but you’ll start to lose the personal communication once you start to automate more,” said Austin Pratt, senior vice president of integrated activation at MissionOne Media.

Giving machines the power to automate could be good for speed, but margins make the difference in activations.

Pratt also said the industry needs to match internal strategies to what the consumer journey looks like, not what the company’s journey looks like.

The industry missed correctly defining the meaning of omnichannel, Pratt said. Checking a box and having multiple tactics in a flowchart technically is the definition, but if it’s missing a “throughline” that is pinned to the client’s expectation, testing framework and measurement, he said, “you’re just running things in parallel.” That’s where it fails and becomes just a “name and namesake.”

Focus can sometimes outweigh fragmentation, Pratt said. “When you don’t have the team, the content, and the creative alignment” is when a company doesn’t do omnichannel well. Brands often say they must be on all channels, but this doesn’t always work.

Live sports, the last “purely unskippable” media, has become a major consideration for brands, said Liz DeAngelis, senior vice president of media and creative at Monks.

“I think it will, like everything else, become inflated,” she said, pointing to upfronts. “We were talking with Amazon about 'Thursday Night Football,' and they are nearly completely sold out. So, you really must think about live sports.”