MiQ Study: 87% of Consumers Abandon the Traditional Marketing Funnel

The marketing playbook most companies have followed for over 100 years is no longer working. A [new global study](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260422269364/en/MiQ-Report-Studying-53-Million-Households-Shows-the-Traditional-Path-to-Purchase-is-Dead) from programmatic media company MiQ has put hard numbers on what many marketers have quietly suspected: the classic "funnel" model, where customers move neatly from awareness to purchase, no longer reflects reality. The data is hard to dismiss. MiQ analyzed 700 trillion behavioral signals from 53 million households over seven days using its Sigma AI platform. The findings reveal that 87% of consumers switch between digital activities at least once per hour, and 42% say their path to buying something feels entirely random. That is not a planning assumption you can work around. It is a structural collapse of the model itself. ### The Funnel Was Built for a Simpler World The traditional marketing funnel dates back to 1898. It was designed for a world where attention moved in one direction: you saw an ad, you got curious, you went to a store. That logic made sense before smartphones, streaming, social commerce, and AI chatbots. Today, a consumer might [discover a product on CTV](https://e-commerce.news/story/miq-says-marketing-funnel-no-longer-matches-consumers), price-check it on their phone, get distracted, return three days later after a retargeted ad, and complete the purchase inside a social app, all without ever visiting a website. As Moe Chughtai, Global VP of Strategy and Partnerships at MiQ, put it: "The funnel was built for a world where the customer journey is linear. Today a consumer can see an ad on CTV, price-check the product on their phone, and buy it on social, all before the next commercial break." The data backs this up. 91% of consumers use a second device while watching TV. 72% of consumers under 34 have [completed an entire purchase inside a social app](https://martech.org/consumers-ditch-the-funnel-as-behavior-gets-more-fluid/). Some discovery-to-transaction journeys now complete in under 10 minutes. ### What This Means for Asian Marketing Leaders For marketing executives in Asia, the stakes are particularly high. [Bain projects](https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/six-trends-to-watch-in-2026-as-asia-pacific-prepares-to-overtake-north-america-as-the-largest-consumer-market-worth-$36-trillion-in-2035/) Asia-Pacific will overtake North America as the world's largest consumer market by 2035, reaching US$36 trillion. Yet the region's consumers are already the furthest from the Western linear model that most measurement tools were designed for. In China and South Korea, e-commerce accounts for roughly 40% of fast-moving consumer goods sales. In the broader APAC region, 39% of consumers already use generative AI when shopping, and another 40% say they are willing to do so. That means nearly 80% of APAC consumers could soon have AI intermediating their purchase decisions before a brand campaign even registers. The measurement gap is severe. Only 14% of APAC brands [consistently connect marketing spend to business outcomes](https://marketech-apac.com/from-smarter-measurement-to-ai-impact-heres-whats-next-for-marketing-advertising-across-apac/) like customer retention or lifetime value. Globally, just 43% of marketers feel confident in their measurement capabilities at all. ### The Real Problem Is Not the Funnel. It Is the Infrastructure Around It. Senior marketers from PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Mars, and WPP have flagged a practical issue: reinvented funnel models, the ones with extra layers and renamed stages, lose credibility with teams trying to actually execute campaigns. What practitioners need are frameworks that match how consumers actually behave today, not updated diagrams of yesterday's logic. Jordan Bitterman, MiQ's Global CMO, framed the shift plainly: "Today, a full customer journey can conceivably take place in hours or minutes, instead of weeks or days. To keep up, marketers must shift from rigid funnels to flexible frameworks." MiQ's own platform data adds a commercial dimension to the argument. Campaigns run through its Sigma system, which tracks signals across screens in real time, [achieved 8x more conversions](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250604957858/en/MiQ-Sigma-Breaks-the-Fragmentation-Cycle-The-First-AI-Platform-That-Unifies-the-Programmatic-Ecosystem) and more than 50% lower cost-per-acquisition compared to standard programmatic approaches for select clients in automotive and media. ### What This Signals for the Region The findings arrive as the broader industry is reaching consensus. The [Comscore 2026 State of Programmatic Report](https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2026/1/Comscore-2026-State-of-Programmatic-Report) found that 87% of media buyers now call cross-channel performance metrics critical or valuable. 58% plan to increase programmatic investment this year. For Asian marketing leaders still budgeting by funnel stage, the message is clear. The consumer has moved on. The question is whether the planning model has.