The marketing funnel is over. Not because it failed to work in its time — but because the time it was designed for no longer exists.
Born into an era of linear media and predictable consumer journeys, the funnel once offered a clean, digestible structure for marketers to model awareness, interest, decision, and action. It functioned well when behaviour was trackable and media activity moved predictably from billboards to television to the point of sale. But in the current age of on-demand attention, atomised platforms, privacy regulations, and algorithmic curation, the funnel has collapsed under its own simplicity.
Today’s consumer path isn’t a funnel — it’s a feedback loop. Discovery happens via fragmented channels, often in the form of peer-to-peer influence or algorithm-suggested moments. Consideration unfolds asynchronously, across browser tabs, DMs, and offline conversations. Conversion is less a final stage and more an aperture: a dynamic and recurring moment contingent on timing, context, and behavioural cues. The modern buyer moves sideways, backwards, and diagonally through an ever-evolving digital ecosystem.
And yet — many marketing organisations still plan, measure, and optimise as if the funnel remains gospel. This misalignment has led to massive inefficiencies: siloed performance data, disconnected brand and performance campaigns, redundant creative spend, and an overwhelming lack of operational agility. The entire system is geared toward reporting on what happened, rather than adapting to what’s happening.
What marketing leaders need now is not a more sophisticated funnel. They need a new architecture — a system designed not to predict where the customer is in a theoretical journey, but to respond in real-time to who the customer actually is, where they’re showing intent, and how to meet that intent dynamically.
This is the world Mortar was built for.
Mortar is not a tool. It’s a full-stack decisioning infrastructure that replaces fragmented processes with adaptive, composable intelligence. Where legacy martech stacks require dozens of point solutions and data wrangling layers to align insights and actions, Mortar unifies strategy, data, and measurement into a single, living system.
Mortar consists of three integrated modules:
Mortar DS (Decision Spine): The clean-data engine of modern marketing. DS automatically ingests, cleanses, deduplicates, validates, and enriches data across CRM, CDP, and ad platforms. It transforms raw, unusable data into unified, activation-ready segments.
Mortar Helix: The strategist on autopilot. Helix interprets campaign briefs and outputs full media and messaging strategies — informed by live customer behaviour, market benchmarks, and proprietary logic. Think of it as a senior strategist trained on every campaign that has ever worked.
Mortar MMM: The foresight layer. This simulation engine enables CMOs to test budget allocations, channel weights, and messaging variations before spending a cent. It’s not a retrospective report. It’s a forward-looking investment model.
Together, these tools form the basis of an entirely new way of operating. Brands that adopt Mortar aren’t just more efficient — they’re fundamentally more intelligent. They move faster, waste less, and build feedback loops directly into the core of their go-to-market engine.
We’re witnessing the rise of adaptive marketing organisations — teams that continuously recalculate the best next move, grounded in empirical evidence and powered by responsive systems. Mortar isn’t here to optimise the past. It’s here to create an entirely new future of marketing.
And those who move first, will move furthest.
