The marketing funnel, that familiar diagram that has decorated agency conference rooms and client presentations since roughly the Eisenhower administration, may be due for retirement — or so says one of the more influential marketers currently working.

Jonathan Mildenhall, the chief marketing officer of Rocket, told Fast Company at the Cannes Lions festival that the traditional funnel model is no longer sufficient for organizing a modern marketing operation. His reasoning is that brands now must communicate with two distinct audiences: human beings, who have always been there, and machines, which have not.

"No CMO of note should be using the traditional marketing funnel to organize their go-to-market," Mr. Mildenhall said, in a statement that will either be remembered as prescient or as the sort of thing people say at Cannes.

Mr. Mildenhall, whose previous posts included marketing leadership at Coca-Cola and Airbnb, joined Rocket with ambitions to transform the mortgage servicer — which now handles one in six American mortgages, representing some $2.1 trillion in principal — into what he calls "an AI-fueled home ownership platform."

His critique extends beyond organizational charts. Mr. Mildenhall expressed concern about what he termed "marketing wallpaper," the accumulation of brand communications that decorate the landscape without actually lodging in anyone's memory. His preferred alternative: "culturally significant stories," a phrase that has launched a thousand creative briefs but which he appears to mean sincerely.

(Whether a mortgage company can reliably produce culturally significant stories remains, as they say, to be determined.)

Perhaps more interesting was Mr. Mildenhall's warning about artificial intelligence leading brands toward what he called "a sea of blandness" — the machines, he noted, are all reading the same categories the same way. The solution, he said, requires "an extreme amount of creative judgment."

It is a curious position for a marketer building an AI-fueled platform: betting on the machines while warning that the machines might homogenize everyone into indistinction. Then again, holding two contradictory ideas has never been a disqualifying condition on Madison Avenue.

Original story published in Fast Company: "Why Rocket is replacing the traditional marketing funnel"