Why Rocket is replacing the traditional marketing funnel

Rocket CMO Jonathan Mildenhall is replacing the traditional marketing funnel with a strategy that serves both human audiences and AI machines, arguing that the old model fails to address the need for authority and trust in the age of large language models. Mildenhall warns that AI-driven blandness threatens brand distinctiveness, urging marketers to use creative judgment to avoid being destroyed by a sea of sameness.

One in six American mortgages are now serviced by Rocket. That encompasses almost 10 million borrowers and manages $2.1 trillion in principal balance. But it wasn’t that long ago that Rocket was lagging in brand awareness. CMO Jonathan Mildenhall has had a storied, award-winning career across brands of all stripes, from Coca-Cola to Airbnb. Now with Rocket, he’s aiming to build the company’s services into the world’s first “AI-fueled home ownership platform.” On the newest episode of Brand New World, I met up with Mildenhall at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity to talk about how his Super Bowl campaign set the stage for the rest of this year, how he is replacing the traditional marketing funnel within his organization, the role of LLM search in his overall brand strategy, and more. On the Failure of Traditional Marketing: “The traditional marketing funnel only speaks to one audience, and that audience is human beings. Today, we have two audiences that need to be served simultaneously: we have human beings… and we have machines that need authority, trust, and industry leadership. No CMO of note should be using the traditional marketing funnel to organize their go-to-market.” On the Rise of “Marketing Wallpaper”: “Sadly, there’s more wallpaper in marketing today than there are culturally significant stories. Our approach at Rocket is to tell culturally significant stories because… they are retained deeper and for longer than marketing stories that are trying to sell product features, which is what the entire category does.” On the Threat of AI-Driven Blandness: “If left to the large language models, they’re all reading the same categories in the same ways; we will move to a sea of blandness which will mean that so many brands will end up being destroyed because they’re not distinct. Marketers have to use an extreme amount of creative judgment to make sure that they remain distinct.” This episode also features an interview with Accenture Song CEO Ndidi Oteh, as part of Fast Company’s “Creativity at Work” series in collaboration with Accenture Song.