Brands are Chasing the Wrong 5% of Shoppers: Channel Factory’s Nerissa Valdellon
MIAMI — Marketers like to imagine consumers carefully moving through a neat purchase funnel, progressing from awareness to consideration and finally to purchase. Consumers, meanwhile, are busy bouncing between social feeds, streaming platforms, search engines and shopping apps before buying something they didn’t even know they wanted an hour earlier.
That’s the central message from Nerissa Valdellon, svp of media solutions at contextual advertising company Channel Factory, during an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at POSSIBLE.
Valdellon pointed to her own purchasing experience, which she recently detailed at the IAB NewFronts, as evidence that brands need to rethink how they measure and plan campaigns.
“I had a great time at the IAB NewFronts presenting on my own personal purchase journey,” Valdellon said. “What’s so important about that journey is that it highlights the way modern consumers buy today.”
According to Valdellon, consumers now move across an average of seven platforms per day. That reality has made traditional channel-based planning increasingly outdated.
“The journey’s fragmented,” she said. “That is not anything new.”
What has changed, she argued, is the need for brands to show up earlier, before consumers have decided they are in the market for a product.
Goodbye funnel, hello 4S
To explain that shift, Valdellon highlighted the “4S” framework: scroll, stream, search and shop.
The model focuses on consumer behaviors rather than media channels or traditional funnel stages. That distinction matters because today’s shoppers often discover, research and purchase products across multiple platforms simultaneously.
“4S framework matters because it represents and aligns to behavior and mindset,” Valdellon said.
In her view, marketers who still categorize social media as purely a discovery tool and video as purely an awareness tactic are working from a playbook that is rapidly aging.
“Social is being transitioned not to just discovery but also search,” she said. “Video is no longer awareness. Video is actually a key driver in the purchase journey.”
In other words, the old funnel may still exist, but consumers seem determined to sprint sideways through it, loop back around and occasionally knock holes in the walls.
The overlooked 95%
One of Valdellon’s more striking observations involved the small percentage of consumers actively shopping at any given moment.
Only about 5% of buyers are considered “in market,” meaning they are ready to make a purchase. Yet many brands concentrate a disproportionate amount of spending on reaching those consumers.
According to Valdellon, that approach creates both inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
“Brands that only focus on 5%, that’s the most expensive part of the social ecosystem,” she said.
The bigger opportunity lies with the remaining 95% of consumers who are not actively shopping but may become interested through effective marketing.
“They’re missing that 95% where they can build their brand from the moment of discovery and intent,” Valdellon said.
The challenge for advertisers is reaching consumers while they are streaming, scrolling and searching, long before they arrive at the checkout page.
Measuring what matters
Of course, every conference eventually arrives at the same destination: measurement.
Valdellon said Channel Factory helps brands understand which activities are actually driving business results by focusing on incrementality, a measurement approach that examines the additional impact generated by advertising rather than simply tallying conversions.
“We help brands understand what’s driving performance,” she said. “We measure through incrementality.”
The company’s technology analyzes content categories, contextual suitability and performance signals to identify what is influencing outcomes across social platforms.
For advertisers overwhelmed by fragmented consumer behavior, rising media costs and endless dashboards, the message was refreshingly simple: stop obsessing over the shoppers already standing at the cash register and spend more time influencing the much larger crowd still wandering the digital aisles.
After all, consumers rarely wake up thinking, “I should buy that product today.” But after seven platforms, three videos, two searches and one late-night scroll session, they often convince themselves otherwise.
MIAMI — Marketers like to imagine consumers carefully moving through a neat purchase funnel, progressing from awareness to consideration and finally to purchase. Consumers, meanwhile, are busy bouncing between social feeds, streaming platforms, search engines and shopping apps before buying something they didn’t even know they wanted an hour earlier.
That’s the central message from Nerissa Valdellon, svp of media solutions at contextual advertising company Channel Factory, during an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at POSSIBLE.
Valdellon pointed to her own purchasing experience, which she recently detailed at the IAB NewFronts, as evidence that brands need to rethink how they measure and plan campaigns.
“I had a great time at the IAB NewFronts presenting on my own personal purchase journey,” Valdellon said. “What’s so important about that journey is that it highlights the way modern consumers buy today.”
According to Valdellon, consumers now move across an average of seven platforms per day. That reality has made traditional channel-based planning increasingly outdated.
“The journey’s fragmented,” she said. “That is not anything new.”
What has changed, she argued, is the need for brands to show up earlier, before consumers have decided they are in the market for a product.
Goodbye funnel, hello 4S
To explain that shift, Valdellon highlighted the “4S” framework: scroll, stream, search and shop.
The model focuses on consumer behaviors rather than media channels or traditional funnel stages. That distinction matters because today’s shoppers often discover, research and purchase products across multiple platforms simultaneously.
“4S framework matters because it represents and aligns to behavior and mindset,” Valdellon said.
In her view, marketers who still categorize social media as purely a discovery tool and video as purely an awareness tactic are working from a playbook that is rapidly aging.
“Social is being transitioned not to just discovery but also search,” she said. “Video is no longer awareness. Video is actually a key driver in the purchase journey.”
In other words, the old funnel may still exist, but consumers seem determined to sprint sideways through it, loop back around and occasionally knock holes in the walls.
The overlooked 95%
One of Valdellon’s more striking observations involved the small percentage of consumers actively shopping at any given moment.
Only about 5% of buyers are considered “in market,” meaning they are ready to make a purchase. Yet many brands concentrate a disproportionate amount of spending on reaching those consumers.
According to Valdellon, that approach creates both inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
“Brands that only focus on 5%, that’s the most expensive part of the social ecosystem,” she said.
The bigger opportunity lies with the remaining 95% of consumers who are not actively shopping but may become interested through effective marketing.
“They’re missing that 95% where they can build their brand from the moment of discovery and intent,” Valdellon said.
The challenge for advertisers is reaching consumers while they are streaming, scrolling and searching, long before they arrive at the checkout page.
Measuring what matters
Of course, every conference eventually arrives at the same destination: measurement.
Valdellon said Channel Factory helps brands understand which activities are actually driving business results by focusing on incrementality, a measurement approach that examines the additional impact generated by advertising rather than simply tallying conversions.
“We help brands understand what’s driving performance,” she said. “We measure through incrementality.”
The company’s technology analyzes content categories, contextual suitability and performance signals to identify what is influencing outcomes across social platforms.
For advertisers overwhelmed by fragmented consumer behavior, rising media costs and endless dashboards, the message was refreshingly simple: stop obsessing over the shoppers already standing at the cash register and spend more time influencing the much larger crowd still wandering the digital aisles.
After all, consumers rarely wake up thinking, “I should buy that product today.” But after seven platforms, three videos, two searches and one late-night scroll session, they often convince themselves otherwise.
