This article was based on the interview with Criteo Chief Product Officer Todd Parsons on breaking down those channel silos by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
It’s a familiar story in any enterprise marketing organization. The social team has its goals, the search team has its metrics, the display team is focused on its own KPIs, and so on. Teams are structured, budgeted, and measured in vertical silos. This is the way it has always been done, a legacy of a simpler time when media channels were distinct and customer paths were, if not linear, at least more predictable. Yet, we all know the truth: our customers do not live in these silos. They drift seamlessly from a social feed to a product review site, from a conversational AI prompt to an in-store visit, often in the span of a few minutes.
This disconnect between our internal operating models and external customer reality is more than just an operational headache; it is a profound strategic liability. It creates waste, obscures truth, and puts a ceiling on growth. And now, the advent of sophisticated AI is not merely offering a new tool to optimize within these silos—it is fundamentally reshaping the customer journey itself, making it more fluid, conversational, and non-linear than ever before. This acceleration of complexity makes our siloed approach not just outdated, but dangerously ineffective. For marketing leaders, the imperative is clear: we must stop trying to force the customer into our organizational chart and start building an operating model that reflects their world.
The True Cost of Silos: A Fragmentation of Truth
The most immediate risk of a siloed marketing operation is often seen in terms of budget and efficiency. Are we over-saturating one audience on social while missing a prime opportunity in search? Are we bidding against ourselves? These are valid and costly concerns. But the more insidious problem, the one that can truly undermine a brand’s growth engine, runs deeper. When each channel team operates with its own data, its own metrics, and its own definition of success, the organization loses its singular source of truth.
This fragmentation doesn’t just impact campaign performance; it distorts the entire strategic picture. As Todd Parsons explains, the issue is not merely the fragmentation of media, but the fragmentation of the very concept of performance within the organization.
“The deeper tissue of this is not just fragmentation of media, it’s really the organization creates fragmentation of truth. In our world, you know, we don’t get paid unless we’re driving outcomes and outcomes are most often sales… and we think that way. So that’s, it’s really easy to see beyond an org chart, or beyond a workflow, beyond channel fragmentation and say, ‘Look, if the truth is I’ve got to sell more product to grow my company, what’s the most effective path to that and how do I measure it so that I’m not being misled?’”
Parsons’ point about being “misled” is critical for any marketing leader. When the social team presents a report showing record-high engagement and the performance marketing team shows a declining ROAS for the same period, who is right? The answer is that neither view is complete. A “like” is not a sale, but it may be a crucial touchpoint on the path to one. A last-click attribution model may give all the credit to a search ad while ignoring the half-dozen display and video impressions that built the initial awareness. Without a unified view, we aren’t just making suboptimal decisions; we are making decisions based on a fractured and incomplete reality. The first step toward breaking down channel silos is not a technology implementation, but a cultural and strategic commitment to a single, outcome-based definition of truth.
AI’s Real Impact: From Demand Capture to Demand Creation
Much of the conversation around AI in marketing has centered on optimization: better bidding algorithms, automated creative generation, predictive audience segmentation. These are powerful capabilities, to be sure, but they represent an evolution of existing practices. The true revolution lies in how AI is fundamentally altering consumer behavior, particularly in the discovery phase of the journey. The classic model of marketing has been built around responding to expressed intent—a user types a query into a search bar, and we serve them an ad. AI-powered conversational interfaces are changing that calculus entirely.
Consumers are no longer just asking for specific products; they are asking open-ended questions and engaging in multi-turn conversations to solve problems. This shift moves the opportunity for brands further upstream, from capturing existing demand to actively creating it.
“Marketers aren’t generally set up for that, right? They’re not set up to actually create intent. They’re usually set up to respond to it… you think about how you work with whatever your preferred agent or, you know, AI assistant is. And I’m talking to mine more than I’m typing anymore. And it’s a multi-turn thing that reveals a new answer each time… each one of those things is an opportunity for a brand to create demand, not just intercept something that I would have said about a specific product.”
This is a paradigm shift. Consider the difference between a user searching for “noise-canceling headphones” versus asking an AI, “How can I focus better while working from home?” The first is a clear signal of intent to purchase. The second is an open-ended problem statement. A savvy brand can now enter that conversation not with a hard sell, but with a helpful solution that introduces their product as a key component. This requires a different mindset—one focused on utility, context, and conversation rather than just keywords and bids. It collapses the top of the funnel, turning what was once a broad awareness play into a direct path to consideration and purchase, all within a single, dynamic interaction.
The New Mandate for Marketers: From Technicians to Strategists
With AI poised to automate many of the rote, tactical workflows of campaign management, a familiar question arises: What is the future role of the human marketer? The answer is not obsolescence, but elevation. As machines handle the complex, data-intensive work of cross-channel optimization, the mandate for marketing professionals shifts from execution to strategy—specifically, the human-centric strategy of understanding and shaping the new conversational customer journey.
The most valuable skills will no longer be centered on mastering the intricacies of a specific ad platform’s UI, but on understanding the psychology of the consumer, crafting a brand narrative that resonates in a conversational context, and orchestrating the interplay between paid and organic touchpoints in these new environments. It’s a move from being a channel technician to being a journey architect.
“I think where people are going is a lot closer to the humanity behind advertising… playing on that conversation is gonna be career-making for a while for a bunch of marketers, including me… how marketers are going to get into that conversation more deeply and have both paid and organic interactions come together for better outcomes. That is a really interesting emerging part of the space that no one’s really talking about just yet.”
This is where leadership becomes crucial. It’s about building teams with hybrid skills—creatives who understand data, analysts who appreciate brand storytelling, and strategists who can navigate the fluid space between a chatbot, a social feed, and a retailer’s website. The “career-making” opportunity Parsons identifies lies in becoming an expert in this new conversational layer of the internet. It requires a deep curiosity and a willingness to experiment, because the rulebook for this new landscape is still being written. Leaders must foster a culture that rewards this kind of strategic thinking and cross-functional collaboration over siloed, channel-specific excellence.
The Way Forward
The path to a truly customer-centric marketing operation is not about abandoning channels, but about transcending them. It requires a foundational shift in how we structure our teams, measure success, and leverage technology. The goal is to create an organization that is as fluid and adaptable as the customers it seeks to serve. This means unifying around business outcomes, not channel metrics, and embracing a single source of truth that provides a holistic view of the customer journey, no matter how fragmented it may appear.
As we look ahead, the technologies and consumer behaviors shaping our industry will only continue to accelerate this fragmentation. AI-driven discovery and conversational commerce are not future-state concepts; they are happening now. The brands that thrive will be those that see this not as a challenge to be managed, but as an opportunity to be seized. It is an opportunity to build deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers by meeting them where they are—with the right message, in the right context, at the right moment—regardless of which box on the org chart that moment falls into. The mandate for us as leaders is to build the engine that can deliver on that promise.
