From Media Planning to Decision Engineering

For years, marketing followed a familiar playbook: reach the right audience, in the right place, at the right time. Optimize channels, track conversions, reinvest in what works. But that model is starting to crack. Not because marketers are doing anything wrong, but because the way decisions are made has changed.

Today, consumers don’t just browse. They ask AI tools, receive curated answers, and often interact with systems that narrow down choices before a brand is even considered. 

According to recent McKinsey & Company research – “The agentic advertising economy: From attention to action” , success is shifting from capturing attention to being surfaced and selected by the systems shaping decisions. That shift has important implications: what gets measured, and what gets optimized, are no longer the same as what drives outcomes.

The illusion of “winning” channels

A growth paths analysis in a high-consideration category highlights how misleading traditional performance views can be. At first glance, results seemed straightforward. A small number of channels consistently appeared at the end of conversion paths and received most of the credit in reporting. 

Naturally, they looked like obvious candidates for increased investment. But when budgets shifted, performance declined. Looking beyond final touch-points, our business analysts reconstructed full customer journeys: more than half of conversions involved multiple interactions, often across several channels. 

The apparent “top performers” were strong closers, but they rarely acted alone. Other channels, often undervalued, played critical roles by:

• building awareness
• shaping consideration
• guiding users toward conversion

Even more revealing was how channels interacted. Some combinations consistently delivered stronger results than individual channels, increasing conversion probability significantly.

The takeaway: performance didn’t come from a channel, it came from a system of interactions.

Why complexity is increasing

This dynamic isn’t new, but AI is accelerating it. The same study from McKinsey & Company highlights that consumer discovery is increasingly happening inside AI-driven environments, where algorithms, not users, decide what gets seen first. At the same time:

• AI tools are influencing research and comparison
• some are beginning to mediate transactions
• and platforms are integrating media, commerce, and measurement into closed environments 

This has two consequences. First, journeys become less linear and more compressed – multiple decisions happen faster, within fewer interactions. Second, visibility decreases. A growing part of the decision process happens in environments where marketers cannot fully see or track every step.

That makes it harder to rely on simple, channel-based interpretations of performance.

From channels to systems: a different analytical lens

So what replaces traditional media planning? Most reporting still focuses on what is easy to observe – final interactions, platform metrics, direct conversions. But as the attribution analysis shows, that view misses how outcomes are actually built. A more useful perspective looks at how activity unfolds across the journey:

• how different channels contribute at different moments
• how they influence each other
• and how sequences and exposure levels shape decisions

Growth paths analysis helps uncover these dynamics by reconstructing journeys and highlighting roles that are otherwise invisible, especially assist contributions and interaction effects.  At the same time, interpretation becomes more important than ever.

Rethinking optimization

Traditionally, improving performance meant refining channel-level execution: adjusting budgets, targeting, or frequency within individual platforms. But when outcomes are driven by interactions, optimization naturally extends beyond individual channels.
The attribution findings point to three consistent drivers of performance:

• clear channel roles (some create demand, others capture it) 
• sequencing (how interactions build on each other) 
• frequency (where additional exposure stops adding value) 

These are not channel-level effects, they are system-level dynamics. At the same time, AI systems increasingly influence what consumers see, compare, and consider in the first place. 

This makes marketing more interconnected than ever. Performance depends not just on presence, but on context – when a message appears, alongside what, and within which decision environment.

Which reinforces a key insight: there is no single “hero” channel driving results. Instead, outcomes emerge from how signals combine over time. As marketing evolves, the challenge is no longer just to manage channels efficiently, but to better understand how decisions take shape.

About Growth Paths
Growth Paths is a data-driven analytics solution that provides a complete view of the customer journey across multiple touch-points, helping identify the channels and interactions that have the greatest impact on conversions.

Deployed across a wide range of projects throughout Central and Eastern Europe, our cross-platform attribution methodology offers an objective view of marketing performance, enabling organizations to assess the contribution of digital and offline channels within a unified measurement framework. 

Photos @Unsplash