If you manage paid search, paid social, or programmatic budgets, the first Jupiter Festival Miami just handed you a 2027 planning problem. The executives who buy and sell premium video spent three days saying that reach is no longer the number that matters. And the money is already moving toward creators, attention-weighted media, and new streaming inventory to back that up.
That matters to PPC people more than it might seem. When the people setting brand budgets change the KPI, the performance team eventually inherits the new scorecard.
I’ve been looking for signals like this at industry conferences since I entered the field in 2002. The speakers at the good ones share strategic insights, critical data, and tactical advice that fly under the radar, because organizers know conventional wisdom won’t fill seats or bring attendees back next year. So, they book people who work at the leading edge of the leading edge.
Jupiter Festival ran from Oct. 6 to 9, 2026, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Its organizers say more than 2,300 media, entertainment, and sports leaders attended. Art Basel’s parent, MCH Group, took a 20% stake in June. The IAB signed up as a founding partner, and YouTube was the founding sponsor.
I didn’t attend. But I reviewed the daily recaps the festival’s publicists sent me, then checked what the speakers said against published data. Four signals held up.
Signal 1: Reach Is Losing Its Grip As The KPI
Jasmine Dawson, senior VP of digital at BBC Studios, on a Day 1 panel about building fandoms that brands can activate said, “Reach should not be the primary KPI.” A big reach number is great for the media owner, she added, but it says nothing about whether the audience will do anything next.
Her distinction was that “building an audience is not fandom and fandom is not audience.”
On Day 2, Marc Guldimann, CEO and co-founder of Adelaide, put a measurement frame around the same idea. “If you want to rate the quality of an opportunity, look at the probability of attention,” he said during a panel with YouTube’s U.S. managing director Brian Albert and Evan Shapiro of ESHAP. Brands, he added, are now telling the whole ecosystem that they care more about quality.
That isn’t a throwaway line from Guldimann. Adelaide’s AU metric scores media placements from 0 to 100 on their likelihood of capturing attention and driving outcomes. Its 2026 Outcomes Guide covers 60 campaigns. And on Oct. 14, a week after Miami, the company launched a partner designation program for survey and outcome partners whose data can be matched directly to AU.
Shapiro pushed the argument furthest. Three days before he unveiled the 2026 Creator Ecosphere Map on stage on Oct. 8, he previewed it in a Substack post headlined “The Era of Reach is Over. Welcome to The Affinity Era.” The map ranks creators by follower count and, alongside that, grades each one on an affinity score.
Three speakers from three corners of the business, the seller, the measurement vendor, and the analyst, landed in the same place. That’s what an emerging trend looks like before it shows up in a platform’s reporting interface.
Here’s my take. Paid search people will be tempted to shrug, because search has never been a reach business. But your YouTube, CTV, and Demand Gen line items probably still report on impressions, CPM, and view rate. Those are reach metrics. If the brand side starts asking for quality-weighted numbers in 2027, the performance team that already has them will own that conversation.
See also: How Do I Measure And Attribute When Clicks Only Tell Part Of The Story? – Ask A PPC
Signal 2: Creator Content Is Turning Into Paid Media Inventory
The Day 3 panel “Direct to Fan: How Creators Are Building the New Media Stack” included Amanda Tarpey, head of creator and creative at YouTube Ads. Her read on advertisers was that marketers are “waking up” to the trust, influence, and authenticity creators have. “They’re saying: I can’t afford to miss that,” she said. “There’s a lot of experimentation, but the infrastructure is not standardized.”
That second sentence is the one PPC teams should underline.
The IAB’s own numbers show why. Its 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report found that 48% of creator ad buyers now consider creators a “must buy,” ranking them just behind paid search and social media. The report put U.S. creator ad spend at $37.1 billion in 2025 and projected $43.9 billion for 2026, according to Digiday’s breakdown of the report.
The split is where paid media comes in. Digiday reports that $13.2 billion of the 2026 total is expected to go to paid amplification of creator content on social media, up 48% from $8.9 billion. Another $11.1 billion goes to amplifying that content beyond social, up 56% from $7.1 billion. In other words, a growing share of “creator marketing” is really ad buying with creator-made creative.
The creators on stage explained the pull. Joakim Noah, the former NBA player who hosts the YouTube series NOMAD, said what he loves about YouTube is controlling his content and “connecting with an audience that is completely different from what you’re used to.” Hudson Matter, a YouTuber and CEO of NextWave Media, called YouTube “one of the most powerful platforms in the world.”
One correction is needed, though. Matter also said, “almost half of the world is on YouTube.” Alphabet doesn’t publish a monthly user count, but DataReportal puts YouTube’s ad reach at about 2.77 billion people a month, roughly a third of the world’s population. That’s closer to half of internet users than half of the world. Use the smaller number in your deck.
My view is that Tarpey’s “not standardized” warning is the real opportunity here. When the infrastructure is messy, the team that can run creator content through the same testing, bidding, and conversion tracking discipline it applies to search ads becomes the team that gets the budget.
See also: Why Running YouTube Ads Like Search Will Burn Your Budget
Signal 3: Streaming And Live Sports Are Manufacturing New Ad Supply
Scott Young, co-founder and chief product officer of Transmit, made the most practical point of Day 1. “With streaming, you have the opportunity to aggregate valuable ad supply that would have otherwise gotten lost,” he said. He singled out women’s sports, which he said are growing on free ad-supported streaming.
Transmit is the plumbing behind that claim. Its software creates in-stream ad units, such as picture-in-picture placements during live games, without adding more traditional ad breaks. The company was selected for the Google Ad Manager Technology Partner Program, which connects that “in-moment” inventory to Google Ad Manager’s programmatic pipes for live and on-demand video.
For anyone buying through Google’s stack or a DSP, that’s the part to watch. New premium sports inventory that used to be sold only through direct deals is starting to show up as programmatic supply.
The women’s sports thread ran through all three days. On Day 2, WNBA legend Lisa Leslie talked about welcoming new fans while staying true to loyal ones. Colie Edison, the WNBA’s chief growth officer, said customers are “three times more likely to purchase from a brand that they support.” I couldn’t find the study behind that number, so treat it as a claim, not a benchmark. On Day 3, LA Sparks president Stacy Johns said it’s on the teams “to create the content and interesting moments for brands to show up authentically.”
There’s a budgeting catch for 2027, too. NBCUniversal Telemundo’s Claudia Chagui described turning Rockefeller Center into a FIFA World Cup fan village this summer. Big live events like that, plus a costly U.S. midterm cycle, inflated 2026. EMARKETER projects total U.S. media ad spending growth will slow from 15.6% in 2026 to 9.4% in 2027, and it warns that CTV budgets built around tournament and election inventory should expect to normalize.
Signal 4: Brands Are Paying For The Top Of The Funnel Again
Anish Melwani, former chairman and CEO of LVMH North America and co-founder of 22 Montaigne Entertainment, described a decade-long tug of war that every performance marketer will recognize. Luxury marketing evolved toward “more lower funnel performance,” he said, “but great luxury brands understand how much you have to keep doing at the top in order for that to make a difference.”
He also drew a line between formats. Luxury will keep looking for “pockets of premium,” he said, while other brands look at two-minute microdramas, and the two occupy different places in consumers’ minds.
Shapiro predicted the same format shift from the other direction. “Like cable in the ’80s, you will see an explosion of premium vertical content in the next 18 months,” he said, adding that brands not engaging “will get left behind.”
Others argued that the brand itself should become the content. McDonald’s VP of marketing Elizabeth Campbell and Known president Ross Martin discussed Meal Ticket, the Prime Video documentary tied to the 50th McDonald’s All American Games. Chris Long, CEO of Longshot Productions, the company behind The Beekeeper franchise, said. “If you have the money and means, instead of spending it on a marketing campaign, why not put it in a film where it will live forever?”
Andrew Gottlieb of NBCUniversal’s Rock Studios, the branded content unit NBCU launched at Cannes in June, added the line I’d tape to the monitor of anyone running AI-generated ad variations at scale. “AI can do a lot, and it can create a lot of content, but it can’t make people care about that content.”
Put those together, and the takeaway for PPC teams is uncomfortable. Search and shopping campaigns harvest demand. When brands shift money back to the top of the funnel, the question your CMO will ask is how much of your conversion volume that upper-funnel spend created. If you can’t answer it, someone else will.
See also: How To Measure PPC Performance When AI Controls The Auction
A Clean Sheet Of Paper, Not A Blank Check
IAB CEO David Cohen gave the line that ties the four signals together. Sitting down on Day 3 with Forbes contributor Howard Homonoff, he said, “The one thing that we simply cannot do is the same thing that we’ve done year-over-year.” Marketers love year-over-year comparisons, he acknowledged, “but if there was a time for a clean sheet of paper and taking advantage of the innovation in the market, it’s now.”
According to festival co-founder William Mellis, as recounted to Net Influencer, Cohen also raised the need for a common currency to measure advertising across fragmented distribution.
I agree with Cohen on the clean sheet. I’d add one condition he didn’t state on stage.
Notice who was making the case against reach in Miami. BBC Studios, YouTube, and Transmit were sponsors, and NBCUniversal and Adelaide sell the alternatives. That doesn’t make them wrong. Sellers often see the shift first because they’re the ones being asked to prove value. But it does mean paid media teams should treat “reach is over” as a hypothesis to test before they budget against it.
Attention scores, affinity grades, and fandom indexes are all better questions than “how many people saw it.” None of them is an answer until you’ve tied it to incremental sales in your own accounts. Ground-truth the new metrics the same way we should have ground-truthed CPM a decade ago.
How To Use This In Your 2027 Plan
Here’s how I’d turn the Miami signals into planning moves for a paid media or PPC team this quarter.
1. Add a quality column to every upper-funnel line item. For YouTube, CTV, and programmatic video, report an attention or media quality score next to CPM and view rate. Then run at least one test that compares high-scoring and low-scoring placements on conversion lift, so you know whether the score predicts results in your accounts.
2. Budget for creator content as ad creative. Set aside test money to run creator-made assets through paid formats such as Meta partnership ads, TikTok Spark Ads, or YouTube creator partnerships. Judge them with the same holdouts, bidding strategies, and conversion tracking you use for search, since that discipline is exactly what Tarpey said the market lacks.
3. Reset your year-over-year baseline. If your 2026 numbers include World Cup or midterm-season inventory, flag it before finance compares 2027 against it. Cohen’s advice to stop running the same plan year after year applies to the comparison too.
4. Write the measurement memo before your CMO asks for it. One page that explains how upper-funnel spend feeds your search and shopping conversions, and which test will prove it, is how a PPC manager starts sounding like a director.
Jupiter Festival’s organizers have already put Miami 2027 on the calendar. My bet is that by then, the speakers will have stopped arguing about whether reach is the wrong KPI and started arguing about which replacement is right.
PPC teams that have run their own tests by then will have something worth saying. The rest will be taking notes.
More Resources:
- Paid Media Marketing: 8 Changes Marketers Should Make In 2026
- 10 Hard Truths About PPC: Insights From Last Year’s Best Debates For 2026
- The Halo Effect: Your Paid Media Went Offline, Can You Survive Without It?
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