The awareness-consideration-conversion funnel isn’t dead — it’s just moved faster than the org chart has. At Cannes Lions 2026, AdExchanger Editorial Director Sarah Sluis sat down with Liane Nadeau, Chief Media and Investment Officer, Digitas, to make the case that channel planning — the TV budget, the search budget, the audio budget, the programmatic line item — no longer reflects how consumers actually move through the world. People discover, consider, and buy in an instant, across platforms that don’t respect channel definitions. The fluid funnel demands a different model: networked experiences that follow consumers wherever they are, planned and optimized in real time. Nadeau breaks down what that looks like in practice, why programmatic is a mechanism not a channel, and where AI fits into making it all work.
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