The century-old traditional marketing funnel is proving to be a model that no longer reflects how consumers actually behave. New global research from MiQ, a leading programmatic media company, finds that 87% of consumers switch between digital activities at least once an hour. They move in rapid and often unpredictable ways, with 42% saying their path to purchase feels entirely random.

“Couches have become the new storefronts as consumers move from screen to screen, almost in the same breath,” said Jordan Bitterman, Global Chief Marketing Officer, MiQ.

MiQ’s proprietary analysis of 53 million households, conducted through its Sigma platform and supplemented through a commissioned study by Censuswide of over 4,000 consumers and 600 marketing professionals, has yielded From Funnel to Flexibility. This global report suggests that marketers must plan, measure, and optimize media differently than they have in the past.

The formerly separate states of watching, browsing and buying are often blurring together: 91% of consumers use a second device while watching TV and 69% say they discover brands they like even when they’re not actively shopping. These findings offer proof that so-called ‘passive’ moments are commercially significant, not dead time.

AI tools and social platforms now act as accelerants. Forty-five percent of consumers already use AI chatbots when shopping, an incredible figure considering these technologies were barely used by the masses just two years ago. Seventy-two percent of consumers under 34 have made a purchase inside a social app — an entire journey completed without switching screens, and a clear signal that marketers must meet consumers wherever those moments occur.

“Couches have become the new storefronts as consumers move from screen to screen, almost in the same breath,” said Jordan Bitterman, Global Chief Marketing Officer, MiQ. “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. This isn’t just a planning shift for marketers, but a mandate for the adtech industry to move beyond channel silos toward systems that unify data, intelligence, and activation, so every investment is accountable to both brand and business outcomes.”

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Yet consumer behavior has outpaced how most marketers operate. Seventy-one percent of consumers say they get distracted mid-research and only return to a purchase when prompted, turning retargeting into a structural challenge that many teams and toolsets aren’t built to handle. At the same time, just 43% of marketers feel confident in their measurement, with fragmented screens and supply paths emerging as core blockers, which are gaps that From funnel to flexibility calls out as urgent priorities for change.

“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,” said Moe Chughtai, Global VP of Strategy & Partnerships, MiQ. “With Sigma and our Advanced Media Solutions, we’re giving clients one intelligence layer to orchestrate every screen and signal with the data depth, AI, and transparency modern marketers expect so every impression truly counts.”

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Sigma, MiQ’s award-winning AI-powered advertising technology, brings order to today’s dynamic consumer journeys and empowers marketers to reach them everywhere they are. In the past 12 months, MiQ has run more than 13,000 campaigns from over 1,200 advertisers — across the open web and the largest walled gardens.

Over that time, Sigma has delivered double-digit gains in reach, efficiency and speed across CPG, retail, travel and political campaigns, while driving triple-digit conversion performance improvement in categories like media & entertainment and automotive. Some clients have seen 8x more conversions and more than 50% lower CPAs versus standard programmatic approaches.

From Funnel to Flexibility Report Methodology

In December 2025 and January 2026, MiQ fielded two surveys and utilized data from its Sigma platform:

• Consumer survey. More than 4,000 consumers ages 18+. Report participants were split evenly across Australia, Canada, the UK and the US, and were asked about current viewing and buying habits – from how they consume media, to how they make decisions about what to buy, and when.
• Advertiser survey. 600 marketing professionals across the same regions were asked about which factors describe their experience with standard retargeting campaigns.
• Proprietary Sigma data. The report tapped 700 trillion signals to analyse 53 million distinct households over seven days in January 2026. MiQ analyzed how many devices an individual consumer used in a single household, how often someone used two devices within 30 minutes, and their transition times at regular intervals.