For years, marketing leaders have been told to meet customers where they are. Today, the problem is that pinpointing where customers are is increasingly fraught as they engage with brands through ever-more channels, often at the same time, in increasingly malleable journeys.
Artificial intelligence has rapidly transformed what was once a manageable ecosystem of discrete marketing channels into a sprawling network of overlapping platforms, formats, and automated decision systems. Social media is no longer just social media. Search is no longer just search. Even direct marketing has evolved into an automated mesh of email, SMS, push notifications, messaging apps, and AI powered outreach that spans marketing, sales, and service functions simultaneously.
In this environment, the traditional channel-based marketing strategy is not just outdated. It is actively impairing performance.
Recent Gartner research finds that only 23% of executives reported their 2025 growth strategies were completely successful. One key reason is that many organizations continue to organize their marketing around channels rather than around customer journeys and platform ecosystems. As AI accelerates fragmentation across media, commerce and engagement environments, optimizing spend within individual channels leads to slower decisions, siloed teams and distorted budget allocations.
With the construct of channels collapsing under the weight of complexity, what CMOs face now is not a channel selection problem but a portfolio management challenge.
Platforms Are the New Assets
Modern marketing execution is increasingly governed by platforms such as Google, Amazon, Meta, marketing automation hubs and digital experience platforms. These environments are not passive delivery vehicles. They increasingly contain embedded AI decision making systems that determine audience targeting, media placement, creative selection and campaign optimization often in real time.
GenAI powered tools already automate campaign creation, measurement and optimization within their respective ecosystems. Some automation platforms can now dynamically select the optimal channel for outreach based on predicted conversion rates for each individual customer.
In the not-so-distant future, these systems will evolve into multiagent environments, where marketing execution will be shaped by interacting AI agents that determine journeys, content, channels and distribution from a single human prompt. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 60% of brands will use agentic AI to facilitate streamlined one-to-one interactions that collapse traditional channel technology architectures and redefine customer journeys.
In other words, marketing outcomes are, and will be, increasingly defined by journeys rather than channels, creating the need for a new operating model built around platform execution.
Marketing as Portfolio Management
Portfolio-based marketing treats each platform ecosystem as a governed asset class with its own cost structure, measurement constraints and optimization logic. Instead of asking which channel should receive incremental budget, marketing leaders must decide how to allocate investment across platforms to maximize customer outcomes per dollar spent.
The approach mirrors financial portfolio management. Just as an investment manager balances mutual funds with varying levels of risk and return, CMOs must balance platform investments based on marginal returns, measurement confidence, switching costs and exposure to pricing volatility. For example, paid media environments are increasingly concentrated in walled gardens, this makes cross platform channel (i.e. social media) measurement and performance comparisons difficult.
Without portfolio discipline, platform native optimizers, such as Amazon’s GenAI powered “Ads Agent,” Google’s PMax, and Meta’s Advantage+, will pursue their own objectives, often pushing spend higher without regard for enterprise cost constraints or customer experience considerations.
Effective portfolio management requires optimization at two levels:
- Interplatform optimization, which allocates resources across ecosystems such as retail media networks, search platforms and automation hubs in order to avoid saturation and diminishing returns
- Intraplatform optimization, which directs embedded automation to choose the best formats, placements and messaging based on platform rules, pricing windows and predicted outcomes
This creates opportunities for channel arbitrage.
Unlocking Channel Arbitrage
Channel arbitrage involves identifying differences in how value is created and priced across touchpoints within a platform ecosystem. To do this, marketers’ direct might enable a platform AI systems to initiate engagements with prospects on a high-converting channel such as WhatsApp, then pivot to a lower cost option such as email if a conversion does not occur within a paid messaging window.
The desired customer outcome remains the same. The path to achieve it shifts dynamically based on cost and performance signals.
Executing this strategy requires governance. Marketing teams must establish enterprise-wide omnichannel goals based on customer journey completion rather than channel-specific metrics. They must also define acceptable thresholds for customer churn, communication frequency and cost per action in order to prevent platforms from optimizing in ways that degrade trust through fatigue or over communication.
Continuous budget reallocation must replace quarterly or annual planning cycles, often in collaboration with CIO and CFO partners who can reduce friction when shifting resources across technology environments.
The End of Channel Thinking
The majority of US consumers now participate in omnichannel shopping experiences that blend digital and physical interactions. As AI continues to reshape engagement environments, marketing leaders can no longer rely on static campaign structures or isolated performance metrics.
Success will belong to organizations that treat platforms as investments, journeys as outcomes, and channels as flexible capabilities deployed in service of those outcomes.
The future of omnichannel strategy is not about mastering more channels. It is about managing the portfolio.
Suzanne Schwartz is a Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice, specializing in multichannel and omnichannel campaign management. Learn more about how to optimize marketing channels at the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo, June 8-10, 2026 in Denver.
