From TikTok Halos to AI Tollbooths, the New Omnichannel Reality Stresses the Need for First-Party Ownership

Most brands claim an omnichannel strategy, but their org charts tell a different story. E-commerce, retail, and social teams still operate on separate scorecards, competing for attribution instead of collaborating around the customer. The measurement gap only grows wider as new channels emerge. TikTok drives discovery that converts in-store, Meta ads lift retail sales that never get credited back to the campaign, and LLM-powered checkout tools add yet another layer between brand and buyer. Fixing the funnel starts not with better technology, but with better internal alignment.

Kait Stephens is the CEO and Co-Founder of Brij, an AI-enabled platform that helps brands build connected retail experiences across online and offline channels. A Harvard Business School graduate, Stephens also hosts The Omnichannel Marketer podcast, interviewing brand marketers on cross-channel growth strategy. She says that closing the omnichannel gap requires untangling the corporate structure before deploying new tools.

"The biggest challenge I see is that organizations are set up in silos that aren't incentivized for an omnichannel customer relationship. Everyone talks about meeting the customer wherever they shop, but the org is still measured by individual channel performance," she says. That misalignment shows up most clearly in how teams measure success. As channels multiply and overlap, legacy attribution models struggle to capture where awareness actually leads to conversion. The gap is growing on multiple fronts.

• The halo gap: "TikTok has a halo effect on DTC, Amazon, and retail. If you are only calculating the success of TikTok based on TikTok Shop sales, that is not thinking holistically. Think about shared company goals across the org," says Stephens. Teams optimizing in isolation will always undervalue channels whose influence crosses boundaries. The fix is measuring platforms like TikTok against total business impact rather than channel-specific revenue, replacing fragmented KPIs with shared goals that reflect how discovery actually flows across touchpoints. Brands like Ouai, a haircare and beauty company, have started restructuring teams and incentives around this principle, treating omnichannel performance as a company-wide metric rather than a department-level one.

• The AI tollbooth: LLMs are quickly becoming a new layer between brands and buyers. Sephora and Shopify now enable checkout directly through ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini has rolled out shopping integrations with Walmart and Wayfair. Early results are uneven, though. Walmart's ChatGPT checkout converted three times worse than its own site. "The implication for marketers is that you are getting less control over the funnel. LLMs are adding another layer of disconnection between a brand and the customer. It will be that much more important for brands to control their own narrative and own first-party data to have that direct relationship," says Stephens.

• The offline loop: Screen fatigue is driving renewed consumer interest in physical retail and experiential activations. But the play is not purely analog. Brands are designing IRL moments that feed directly back into digital channels. Alix Earle's offline puzzle-piece teaser for her brand launch is one recent example of a physical activation built to generate social content. "There is a complete snapback to in-person and experiential, but it is also done with the goal of getting consumers to take videos and post on TikTok and Instagram. What we're really seeing is this offline-to-online world, creating real life experiences that you want the consumer to bring back to the digital world to create virality," says Stephens.

Securing a direct relationship with consumers also requires a tactical shift in how marketers create content. As LLMs reshape product discovery, discoverability increasingly depends on the data these models ingest, and that data skews heavily toward authentic community conversations. Reviews, Reddit threads, and forum discussions now carry outsized weight in how AI-powered search surfaces and ranks brands. Marketing teams that once optimized for Google's algorithm are learning to optimize for an entirely different set of inputs.

• Subreddits and social proof: "Brands need to be heavily focused on first-party data ownership so they can have that direct relationship, but then also on building content that controls the narrative. Reviews are going to be more important than ever. Reddit commentary is more important than ever. This is what the LLMs are prioritizing," says Stephens. Managing that content volume across a fragmented channel mix is pushing marketing teams to adopt AI internally as a productivity tool, using the same technology that is reshaping the funnel to keep pace with it.

Even the best tools and workflows fall short without disciplined channel selection. Not every platform deserves the same level of investment, and spreading resources evenly is a fast way to underperform on all of them. The starting point is always the customer. Where they shop, how they discover, and what they expect from the buying experience should dictate where a brand shows up and how much it commits.

• Costco over clout: "If your customer wants to shop with you and they're a bargain hunter and Costco buyer, then that's the channel you should prioritize. Think about channel prioritization based on where your consumer wants to shop you," says Stephens. For most brands, Amazon has become a baseline utility. If consumers are already searching for a product there and it is absent, the brand is leaving demand on the table. But presence is not the same as commitment. Amazon can often be managed effectively through an external agency, while other channels require a fundamentally different level of resourcing.

• No half-measures: "For you to do well on TikTok, you need a dedicated hire. That takes more company resources," says Stephens. TikTok functions as a discovery engine whose impact extends well beyond TikTok Shop, lifting sales across DTC, Amazon, and retail. Capturing that requires dedicated headcount and a real content commitment, not a side project managed by an already-stretched team.

For all the complexity introduced by AI-mediated checkout, fragmented attribution, and an ever-expanding channel mix, Stephens returns to a simple filter. Org structure, metrics, and resourcing should all align around where customers actually shop and how they move between in-store and digital. When that alignment is missing, even the most sophisticated strategies underperform. "What is most important for marketers is putting the consumer at the center of how they think about channel strategy. That fundamental shift of the customer first and not the channel first is how marketers are going to be most effective at executing an omnichannel strategy."