Amazon’s Gulshan Verma on why full‑funnel is the new advertising mantra

The eighth edition of Screenage 2025, the flagship mobile-marketing conference by exchange4media, unfolded on 2 December 2025 in Mumbai brought together marketers, agencies, media platforms and technology leaders to decode how India’s fast-expanding screen-first consumer landscape is reshaping brand building and business growth. Interestingly, this year’s conference focussed on how brands can stay agile and relevant in a world where every touchpoint is measurable, and every audience is moving.

Among the standout conversations of the day was the marquee Fireside Chat titled “The Full-Funnel Advantage: How Data, Media & AI Are Transforming Growth.” The discussion featured Gulshan Verma, Director, Amazon Ads, who has been part of India’s digital ecosystem for more than two decades, in conversation with Dr. Anurag Batra, Chairman & Editor-in-Chief, BW BusinessWorld and Founder of exchange4media.

The session examined how marketers must move beyond the brand versus performance debate to understand the consumer journey across screens, influencers, recommendations, OTT content, and commerce, providing a grounded, forward-looking perspective on the evolution of full-funnel advertising in 2025 and beyond.

During the conversation, Verma emphasised that the traditional debate of “brand versus performance” has outlived its purpose. In his view, the consumer journey no longer resembles a linear funnel; instead, it is fluid, multi-screen and deeply behaviour-driven. “Consumers move between inspiration, discovery, research, evaluation and purchase in minutes, not months,” he remarked, stressing that a full-funnel approach is not a theoretical model anymore but a real reflection of how India shops today. He added that brands who plan media with the intent to influence every stage of the journey together, rather than in silos, are consistently seeing disproportionate compounding results.

He explained that Amazon Ads is increasingly seeing brands unlocking better outcomes not by shifting money from branding to performance or vice-versa, but by integrating objectives across the journey and driving awareness that also fuels category entry, boosting consideration that simultaneously strengthens preference, and activating performance without undermining long-term equity. “The industry needs to move from fragmented optimisation to journey optimisation, because consumers do not separate a brand’s story from its offer, nor its emotion from its value proposition,” said Verma.

The conversation then moved into how technology, especially AI, is accelerating this shift. Verma noted that AI is no longer limited to targeting or automation; it is now shaping creativity, media, and measurement all at once. 

He highlighted that AI-assisted creative tools are shortening production cycles while enabling marketers to generate multiple versions of an idea aligned with different audiences and contexts. “We are entering a phase where the cost of creating and testing creatives, including videos, is dropping to almost zero. You can generate thousands of variations for different consumer cohorts in minutes.”

On the data front, he said marketers now have the ability to understand consumer behaviour, and to use that insight to refine messaging in real time. He stressed that AI multiplies the impact of instinct and imagination by allowing creative thought to reach the right audience under the right circumstances with the right task. Adding to this, Verma pointed out, “For decades, only the large advertisers could afford high-end creative plus media experimentation. With AI-generated creative and AI-driven media planning, several Indian businesses will have access to the same capabilities.”

Both speakers underscored the rising importance of measurement in making full-funnel strategies mainstream. Verma noted that marketers today are less interested in isolated metrics and more focussed on unified brand outcomes.

He highlighted that the future will be defined not by how loudly brands speak across platforms, but by how intelligently they connect signals across the service, a shift from measuring channels to measuring journeys.

The fireside chat also touched on the explosive rise of video-driven commerce. Verma explained that with consumers now discovering products through video content, influencer streams and short-form formats, the distance between inspiration and purchase has dramatically reduced.

He stated, “The future of commerce will be creative at scale, and fiercely competitive, because reaching the right user with the right offer and the right message will become very easy.”

As the session drew to a close, both speakers agreed that the next phase of marketing leadership will belong to brands that embrace the full-funnel mindset not as a media plan but as a philosophy. Verma urged marketers to build for continuity rather than fragmentation, to plan narratives that flow across screens and formats, to treat technology as a creative accelerant , and to use insights to sharpen decisions without compromising brand authenticity.