The traditional marketing funnel - awareness, consideration, conversion - assumes customers move in a straight line. They do not. Google’s landmark “Messy Middle” research revealed that buyers loop endlessly between exploration and evaluation, influenced by cognitive biases, brand mentions, and category cues, often for weeks or months before purchase. Yet most marketing plans, media buys, and attribution models still pretend the funnel is linear. The result: wasted budget, misattributed conversions, and brands that show up at the wrong moment.
In this session, Serbay Arda Ayzit dives deep into how modern customer journeys actually work and how to design marketing around them. He covers the six cognitive biases that shape evaluation loops, how to build “category entry points” that make a brand the first thought when a need arises, and how to plan media that maintains presence throughout the messy middle rather than chasing bottom-funnel conversions alone. He also examines why brand and performance are not opposing forces but compounding ones, and how to allocate budget between them with discipline.

Attendees will leave with a messy middle mapping framework for their own category, a media planning template designed for non-linear journeys, and a practical method to identify and own the category entry points that drive long-term growth.