Reach Is Dying As A Paid Media KPI: Four Signals From Jupiter Festival Miami

More than 2,300 media, entertainment and sports leaders spent three days at the first Jupiter Festival Miami telling the industry that reach is no longer the number that matters. Jasmine Dawson, senior VP of digital at BBC Studios, set the tone on Day 1: "Reach should not be the primary KPI." Her distinction was blunt: "building an audience is not fandom and fandom is not audience."

The festival ran Oct. 6 to 9, 2026, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. MCH Group, Art Basel's parent, took a 20% stake in June. The IAB signed as a founding partner and YouTube was the founding sponsor.

For paid search, paid social and programmatic teams, this is a 2027 planning problem. When the people who set brand budgets change the KPI, performance teams eventually inherit the new scorecard.

What does the shift away from reach change?

Three speakers from three corners of the business — seller, measurement vendor and analyst — landed in the same place.

Marc Guldimann, CEO and co-founder of Adelaide, put a measurement frame around Dawson's argument on Day 2. "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. He added that brands are telling the ecosystem they care more about quality.

Adelaide backs the line with product. Its AU metric scores media placements from 0 to 100 on their likelihood of capturing attention and driving outcomes, and its 2026 Outcomes Guide covers 60 campaigns. 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 furthest. Three days before unveiling 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 grades each on an affinity score.

Search practitioners may shrug, since search has never been a reach business. But YouTube, CTV and Demand Gen line items still report impressions, CPM and view rate. If brand teams ask for quality-weighted numbers in 2027, the performance team that already has them will own the conversation.

How big is creator content as paid inventory?

Amanda Tarpey, head of creator and creative at YouTube Ads, said on the Day 3 panel "Direct to Fan: How Creators Are Building the New Media Stack" that marketers are "waking up" to creators' trust and authenticity. "They're saying: I can't afford to miss that," she said. "There's a lot of experimentation, but the infrastructure is not standardized."

The IAB's 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report shows the money. It found 48% of creator ad buyers now consider creators a "must buy," ranking 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, per Digiday's breakdown.

The split matters for ad buyers:

• $13.2 billion of the 2026 total goes to paid amplification of creator content on social media, up 48% from $8.9 billion.
• $11.1 billion goes to amplifying that content beyond social, up 56% from $7.1 billion.

A growing share of "creator marketing" is ad buying with creator-made creative. Joakim Noah, the former NBA player who hosts the YouTube series NOMAD, said he values 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: Matter also said "almost half of the world is on YouTube." Alphabet publishes no monthly user count, but DataReportal puts YouTube's ad reach at about 2.77 billion people a month — roughly a third of the world, closer to half of internet users.

Tarpey's "not standardized" warning is the opening. The team that runs creator content through search-grade testing, bidding and conversion tracking becomes the team that gets the budget.

Where does new ad supply come from?

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 singled out women's sports, growing on free ad-supported streaming. Transmit's software creates in-stream ad units, such as picture-in-picture placements during live games, without adding traditional ad breaks, and the company joined the Google Ad Manager Technology Partner Program.

Women's sports ran through all three days. WNBA legend Lisa Leslie spoke about welcoming new fans. Colie Edison, the WNBA's chief growth officer, said customers are "three times more likely to purchase from a brand that they support" — a claim without a published study behind it. LA Sparks president Stacy Johns said teams must "create the content and interesting moments for brands to show up authentically."

A budgeting catch awaits 2027. NBCUniversal Telemundo's Claudia Chagui described turning Rockefeller Center into a FIFA World Cup fan village. Big live events 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 warns that CTV budgets built around tournament and election inventory should expect to normalize.

Are brands funding the top of the funnel again?

Anish Melwani, former chairman and CEO of LVMH North America and co-founder of 22 Montaigne Entertainment, described luxury marketing drifting toward "more lower funnel performance," adding that great brands "understand how much you have to keep doing at the top in order for that to make a difference."

Shapiro predicted a format shift: "Like cable in the '80s, you will see an explosion of premium vertical content in the next 18 months." 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, asked: "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 added a caution for teams scaling AI-generated ad variations: "AI can do a lot, and it can create a lot of content, but it can't make people care about that content."

IAB CEO David Cohen tied the threads together on Day 3: "The one thing that we simply cannot do is the same thing that we've done year-over-year." According to festival co-founder William Mellis, as recounted to Net Influencer, Cohen also called for a common currency to measure advertising across fragmented distribution.

One caveat. BBC Studios, YouTube and Transmit were festival sponsors; NBCUniversal and Adelaide sell the alternatives. Sellers often see shifts first, but paid media teams should treat "reach is over" as a hypothesis to test — tying attention scores and affinity grades to incremental sales in their own accounts before budgeting against them.

Jupiter Festival has already scheduled Miami 2027. By then, the argument will likely have moved from whether reach is the wrong KPI to which replacement is right.