Manifest Is Making the Middle the Most Important Part of the Funnel

Performance is plateauing. Brand love is slipping. And somewhere in between, growth is stalling out.

That’s the space Manifest wants to own.

Fresh from completing a merger with Aisle Rocket (the company which acquired Manifest in March 2024) and uniting under a single brand, the independent agency is betting big on the “messy middle” – the overlooked part of the funnel where awareness is supposed to turn into preference, and where many marketers quietly lose the customer.

It’s a reintroduction that arrives at a pivotal moment. With budgets under increased scrutiny and performance media no longer presenting the easy wins it once did, marketers are feeling the pressure to prove value across the entire customer journey – not just at the top or the bottom. And as holding companies consolidate and restructure, Manifest is positioning itself as a more agile, integrated and accountable alternative.

The new Manifest blends two complementary strengths: the original Manifest’s deep-rooted expertise in content strategy, brand journalism and complex B2B storytelling with Aisle Rocket’s strong capabilities in digital experience, marketing technology and brand and product creative, while integrating the strong performance capabilities of both teams.

The agency is led by CEO Ross Shelleman, chief experience officer and partner Steve Slivka, and chief growth officer and partner Melissa Bouma. The leadership trio believes both the merger and the timing are no coincidence. As holding companies consolidate and performance-driven marketing loses some of its spark, they see a real opportunity to help brands unlock growth where it’s been stalling the most.

The Messy Middle Is Where Growth Falls Apart

In Manifest’s view, years of over-correcting toward short-term performance has come at a long-term cost.

“The world has been addicted to performance,” says Ross. “I put $5 in and get $15 out. Then the next year, I put $5 in and might only get $12 out – and then it keeps sliding down.”

He says CFOs and boards then push harder for results as performance declines, and brand investment falls by the wayside. “Because it was so good for so long just betting on performance, people stopped investing in brand.”

Steve believes that’s exactly where the messy middle starts to unravel. “The best thing we can be to our clients is useful and effective,” he says. “Our ability to bolster digital capabilities plus brand creative capabilities, with the ability to create content across all the channels and across the funnel, was totally complementary to what we knew we needed to do – deliver smart, objective solutions for clients.

“That is why we talk about the middle being the gap, not the only thing that we do,” he adds. “We’re not looking for mid-funnel briefs. But those components get ignored and become the weak points in a go-to-market approach.”

Melissa says the agency’s outlook is resonating most with “brave CMOs” – the kind of leaders who are tired of the “same conveyor belt of advertising”. They want partners who can move faster and think more flexibly about where growth actually happens.

“They're looking for an agency who understands how to solve business challenges and knows how to accelerate growth,” she says. “Someone who may not be the front-leading brand at times but really needs to leapfrog over. They’re braver, they’re more courageous, and they’re willing to say, ‘What do we need to do to get to where we need to go?’ rather than follow the steps laid out for everyone that’s come before.”

It’s exactly those clients, she adds, who stand to benefit most from Manifest’s focus on the messy middle. “That’s why we’re so excited about the idea of building from the middle out – tackling that hardest part first,” she says. “Because that is where the growth stalls, and that is the business outcome that the CMO is now accountable for. We start there, and then we build out.”

But winning over the CMO is only half the battle. The real tension sits higher up.

Ross spends much of his time with CEOs, CFOs and private equity partners – leaders who, he says, are increasingly sceptical of marketing’s ability to drive business results. “There is still a dramatic disconnect between marketing and the rest of the C-suite,” he says. “That’s why CMO tenure is at abysmal levels.”

He describes a mindset he encounters often: “I’m not a marketer. I don’t really believe in it. I don’t really understand brand.”

But that scepticism doesn’t square with reality. Every leader engages with great branding and marketing every day. The issue, Ross argues, is not belief; it’s a widening divide between brand and performance, and who gets credit for growth. “It is amazing how much tension there is between brand versus performance,” he says. “From my vantage point, seeing this play out at very senior levels across both public companies and private equity-backed companies, it is a war that is getting worse.”

Steve interjects to tell the story of a client who said they’d “performanced out” having a point to their brand. “They lost the why behind what they were doing and the value they actually provided to their consumers.”

For him, the answer isn’t always another campaign. It’s rebuilding the brand’s presence in the everyday moments where customers are actually paying attention. Increasingly, that means moving beyond broadcast assets and into new tools, formats and behaviours.

“I was on a call with a client recently where we very much moved from doing broadcast to looking at AI content that is going to aid from an AI search standpoint,” adds Steve. “It’s still very much brand stewardship. We still need to put the same ingenuity, care and creativity into that content, but it’s going to express itself in a different way.”

A Leadership Model Designed Around the Work

If Manifest wants to fix the messy middle for clients, it needs a structure that avoids the silos that create those gaps. That thinking, alongside a proudly independent spirit, has shaped how the newly combined leadership team operates day to day.

Ross has deliberately taken direct oversight of account teams, a shift he says keeps the business grounded in client reality rather than internal process. “There’s no better place for me to be than with our clients,” he says. “When I sit with them, I get a different perspective. It helps me do everything else better.”

Steve’s remit spans product and delivery – integrating creative, content, technology and experience design, while making sure the machine behind the work is built to support brilliance rather than slow it down. “What I learned early in my career is that the reason I couldn’t get anything done is the machine wasn’t working to support what I wanted to accomplish,” he says. “So I had to spend time understanding how to build capabilities, how to build processes, to also make it possible for my teams to do brilliant work.”

As chief growth officer, Melissa owns the commercial engine – from positioning and marketing to media and performance – ensuring the agency proves its value in the same ways it promises to do for clients. “Stewardship of both performance and media teams but also driving growth strategies for the agency,” says Melissa. “Where are the opportunities for us to go out and proactively solve problems for our clients? How do we brand ourselves, how do we show up in a way to make sure that clients and partners know that who we are and how we’re different?”

AI as an Accelerator

A key point of focus in the success of Manifest is “inserting artificial intelligence” into everything the agency does. Every single department has an ‘AI champion’ and they are experimenting with it from a client, internal process and search perspective.

For Ross, the biggest opportunity is using AI to expand what’s possible – not just to make existing tasks cheaper. “Think of it offensively, not defensively,” he says. “The places where people are totally missing this is the race to the bottom – hoping to do what they do now, cheaper. If you could afford to test five things, now you can afford to test 50. If I could produce 10 assets, now I can produce 50.

“Accelerate into it,” he adds. “Don’t use it to simply take cost out. That’s going to fail.”

Steve adds that the value lies in where AI has real impact, not in treating it like an efficiency checkbox. “Where is it needed? Where is it vital? Where is it going to make an impact for me right now?” he ponders. “It’s less about building the asset and more about building the system that allows them to generate those assets… Those are the things that are actually proving out to be substantive and useful to our clients right now.”

What Success Looks Like Next

Looking ahead, Ross says success will be measured by how Manifest grows with the right kinds of opportunities. “We’re looking for the right clients, solving the right problems, not just grabbing anything that fills the funnel,” he says. “As we emerge under the new Manifest, building our reputation and solidifying that people know who we are and what we stand for – that’s important.”

He adds that continuing to integrate AI across the business remains a major focus. “That’s paramount, and we talk about it every single day.”

For Melissa, success will be proven through partnerships that validate the middle-out approach. “Success for us looks like business and client growth,” she says, “but also new partnerships and the belief that the middle is the unlock as the starting point – this idea of getting away from either being brand oriented or performance oriented, and thinking about where it is that the middle stalls out.”

And for Steve, progress looks like work that doesn’t quite fit old categories, because it’s charting new ones. “Smart, elegant work that solves some of those complex business problems. The spaces in between. Finding the ways that we break new ground where people aren’t quite sure what category to put it in.”

And if the messy middle is where growth has been stalling, Manifest’s bet is simple. It’s also where the next wave of progress begins.

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