Conquering the murky middle: How incrementality can help you win where it’s hardest to measure

[this is a Part 2, carrying on from yesterday's article, What is incrementality and why does it matter?]

The top of the funnel is all vibes. The bottom of the funnel is all spreadsheets. But the middle is lowkey a mess.

Welcome to the murky middle, where customers drift in and out of awareness, content gets consumed without clear outcomes, and attribution gets muddy—fast. They see an ad, read a blog, watch a video, forget you exist, come back three weeks later via a different device. And your CRM is like, “No idea who that was.”

And yet, this is where most of your potential customers are actually making up their minds. So how do you bring strategy to the most chaotic part of the funnel?

 You start measuring what matters. You start measuring incrementality.

Justin Choi, founder of Nativo, described the Murky Middle at Cannes 2025 as that space where “the customer goes through, learns about things, consumes content, and you lose them, and then they show up again later.”

It’s the wandering phase. The figuring it out phase. The “maybe I’ll just open a tab and never return to it” phase. If you know, you know.

And it’s full of signals that we often ignore or misread because they don’t result in clean conversions. But here’s the thing: influence doesn’t always look like a click. This is where incrementality shines.

Incrementality helps you separate what works from what just happened to be there.

It’s the difference between:

• That content series that made someone actually care vs.

• The retargeting ad that just happened to close the deal

If you want to know which touchpoints are actually moving people through the funnel and not just toward a transaction, but toward trust and preference, you need to start thinking in terms of additional lift.

Incrementality forces you to ask: Did this creative move the needle? Did this placement change behaviour? And when applied to the murky middle, it becomes a flashlight in the fog.

The practical problem, though, is that it’s a data maze.

It’s not as if marketers don’t want to measure incrementality in the middle. It’s that doing so feels like solving a murder mystery across six tabs, four channels, three devices and a burner TikTok account.

As Tim Vanderhook, cofounder of Viant, pointed out at Cannes, today’s consumer journey spans countless digital touchpoints. “The challenge,” he said, “is lining all these metrics up so it makes logical sense.”

This is where a smarter, multi-touch approach to incrementality comes in:

• Track exposure across formats, not just clicks.

• Measure lift across different segments and geos.

• Run holdout tests during content campaigns, not just after.

• Stop over-rewarding the last click and start rewarding the actual turning points.

The new creative brief for the middle.

The Murky Middle doesn’t mean throwing content into the void and hoping it sticks. It means designing for curiosity, optimising for dwell time, and measuring what nudges people forward - not just what gets them to buy.

That could look like:

• Native formats that drive meaningful exploration

• Creative that’s built to earn time, not just impressions

• Programmatic content placements that are built for engagement, not just reach

And most importantly, testing all the above with an incrementality lens. Because a 3% lift in brand affinity here could be the reason someone buys from you later.

The takeaway here is to not abandon the middle, but master it.

The Murky Middle used to be a black box. Now, it’s a place you can actually map, but only if you stop chasing neat numbers and start asking harder questions.

Incrementality isn’t just a measurement framework. It’s a mindset. One that says: “I don’t just want to know what performed. I want to know what mattered.” And in a funnel where customer journeys are increasingly chaotic and non-linear, that’s a strategy that will keep you moving forward.

-Sophie Randell, Writer