Definitely POSSIBLE in 2026
Five Themes and Four Fails From Miami Beach
Another POSSIBLE is in the books, and if last year’s edition at the Fontainebleau felt like a genuine inflection point for this still young conference, this one felt like a coming-of-age party. The fourth annual gathering wrapped Wednesday in Miami Beach, and I left the dual-campus sprawl of the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc genuinely energized about where our industry is headed, even if the path there remains more complicated than any keynote slide will admit.
More than 7,500 registered attendees – and a few thousand interlopers - made the pilgrimage to South Florida this year, representing the full architecture of our ecosystem: brands, agencies, publishers and platforms, creators, technologists and the growing tribe of professionals whose job titles didn’t exist five years ago. With 66% of attendees holding VP-level titles or higher, the conversations here carry weight. Deals get made. Strategies get stress-tested, and, occasionally, someone says the quiet part out loud in a suite in front of invited guests. What follows are my five takeaways from the show and four areas where Christian, Michael and the Hyve crew need to have a think.
Here are my five take-aways:
1. The creator economy has officially ascended
POSSIBLE made a bold bet this year by launching the Creator Economy Academy and giving the creator conversation its own dedicated track. That bet paid off. Issa Rae closed the conference Wednesday with a packed session on how brands, creators, and culture are rewriting entertainment in real time — and it wasn’t a celebrity cameo. It was a substantive conversation about the structural shift underway in how content gets made, distributed and monetized. My old friend, Beau Avril, from Beast Industries and Mary Ellen Coe, from YouTube, anchored the creator narrative throughout the week alongside CMOs from Home Depot, General Motors, Kraft Heinz and AT&T. The message was unambiguous: creators are no longer a consideration for your media plan, they are central to it. Cannes Lions recognized this last summer when it renamed its Social & Influencer category the Social & Creator Lions. POSSIBLE’s overt homage to the creator economy this year confirms that the industry has moved past the debate.
2. Agentic AI is the catalyst of the moment — and the industry is developing a healthy allergy to the hype
Everyone at POSSIBLE was talking about how they are using agentic AI. The practitioners I spoke with are no longer interested in theoretical applications. They demonstrated their applications. Right now, agentic tools are helping agencies and sellers automate workflows and formerly manual campaign setups. in a standing-room only theater, Mutinex (my client) even demo’d an agentic solution that they deployed for Hershey’s that allows them to measure the impact of their campaigns at a SKU and channel level using AI turbocharged MMM. As someone who managed MMM for a large financial services institution, I am awestruck how real-time it now is. Mike Finnerty, US President of Mutinex said it best: “MMM just moved from an archeology experiment to powering Hershey’s real-time OS.”
Truly autonomous agent-to-agent media buying remains a ways off for the open ecosystem, but Trade Desk founder and CEO, Jeff Green, assured Axios media correspondent extraordinaire, Sara Fischer, is confident that it will be a game changer for the open-web, let’s hope he’s right. At the same time, Magnite announced a meaningful expansion of its buyer agent capabilities during the conference, with Disney Advertising, MiQ and Kepler among their early partners. The groundwork is being laid. But the industry’s growing impatience with vaporware is itself a sign of maturity. That’s rapid progress.
3. Trust is the new currency
The big reveal at POSSIBLE was not that AI agents are coming to, or perhaps for, marketing. Everyone already knows that. The more useful reveal was that AI is forcing marketing to confront an older, more stubborn problem: credibility. MMA Global CEO and the man who conceived what became POSSIBLE, Greg Stuart, framed it directly in his opening remarks, saying that “trust has always been fragile around marketing,” and then pushed the room toward a harder standard: less opinion, more evidence, more predictable contribution to growth (see: Adweek). That idea showed up elsewhere too, including ADWEEK House’s “The Questions Brands Aren’t Hearing,” which explored how brands lose relevance, which I assert is a form of trust, when they mistake available signals for actual consumer intent. My read: trust is not built by allegedly ubiquitous messages or saying more. It is built by reducing the distance between what people need to know and what brands are prepared to prove.
Trust made the AI conversation feel less breathless and more adult. AdExchanger also noted that the hallway conversation had moved past hype and toward what agentic tools can actually do today, while Horizon Media’s Domenic Venuto offered the sharper warning: the industry still has time to create better standards before the next generation accepts “AI slop as creative,” because “human ingenuity and trust is absolutely necessary” (see: AdExchanger). The same instinct surfaced in the public #POSSIBLE2026 conversation, (which will undoubtedly begin to appear in your LinkedIn feed in the next few weeks) where Stacy Bohrer connected performance to cleaner signals, greater transparency and better supply-side decisioning (See: LinkedIn). That is the connective tissue: trust is no longer a brand virtue we admire after the fact. As J.P. Morgan Chase’s Tracy-Ann Lim said: “Trust is the measure of doing this stuff (the application of AI to marketing) correctly. Trust is a new ROI” (see her full quote in The Current). It is becoming both a performance input and an outcome. In the next era of marketing, the winners will not be the companies that automate the most claims. They will be the ones that make their claims easiest to believe.
4. The creator economy’s supply is outrunning its demand — and the math is getting uncomfortable
Above I heralded the arrival of the creator economy into the center ring of POSSIBLE. But there’s also tension underneath all the creator optimism this week: U.S. advertisers are expected to spend $43.9 billion on “sponsored content” (can we please…) this year, up meaningfully from 2025. But the number of creators competing for those dollars is growing considerably faster than the budgets chasing them. Measurement remains the unsolved equation — brands still expect something close to a unicorn, messaging tailored to bespoke audiences that deliver television-style impact to their campaign. The challenge with that is creator performance is inherently algorithmic and audience-dependent. Unilever has scaled to 300,000 creator relationships (!), betting on long-term partnerships over transactional buys to command attention. Most brands haven’t caught up. The Creator Economy Academy was a valuable step toward closing that gap. But the industry needs measurement frameworks that reflect the actual dynamics of creator-led media, not force-fit attribution models borrowed from display advertising. Hen Innis, sending you the bat signal on this one.
5. The serendipity is real — and it’s the product
I’ve said it about Cannes every year in my annual recap in AdExchanger and it applies equally here: the planned serendipity of POSSIBLE is its most underrated feature. The boardwalk between the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc, the beach activations, the 5K that kicked off Monday morning (snap, missed that one), the Yacht Club networking that ran into the evening and the piraña tank that is the lobby bar of the Fontainebleau that ran into the late night — these aren’t peripheral to the conference, they’re integral. They are the infrastructure of a conference that facilitates how learning happens and business actually gets done. You have a coffee on a convenient bench with Norm de Greve who you haven’t seen since last year’s ANA Masters of Marketing. A platform executive catches you between sessions with a product brief that reframes how you think about measurement. Tracy-Ann Lim carves thirty minutes into her schedule to sit with one of your clients because that’s what friends do. You’re hosting two client dinners, expected at a third and watching a fourth client slaying his opponent on the Fight Club Inspiration stage. POSSIBLE, now in its fourth year, has figured out what Cannes Lions took decades to perfect: serendipity requires architecture. Spontaneity requires planning. The best deal you make at a conference is never the one you scheduled. The maddening crowd is a feature, not a bug.
And now, the fails:
1. No banner towing helicopters over the beach next year, please
Under the heading of “Are you fucking kidding me,” flying a loud helicopter back and forth over the beach front meeting spaces and sponsor pavilions promoting some of the conference participants while meetings were being conducted and content was being recorded was truly The Hyve Group’s “WTF Moment.” Beyond idiotic. I watched Marcus Startzel, CEO of GumGum, repeatedly restart and then have to pause his fireside chat about mindset decoding with Gallo CMO, Stephanie Gallo, because the kamikaze pilot of the chopper kept buzzing the (resplendent) GumGum booth (yes, GumGum is a client too).
2. How much is too much?
There were a lot more marketers at POSSIBLE this year than in previous years, that was obvious to everyone. The problem was that the number of people trying to sell them things grew disproportionately to unwise numbers. Indeed, there were 38% more registered attendees this year than last, but it felt like the number of vendors doubled. I didn’t see logo’s on the toilet paper, but every other surface had someone’s branding on it and the Eden Roc sponsor ghetto was marketers’ daytime ‘avoid at all costs’ equivalent of the Fontainebleau’s lobby bar. One suggestion, which I intend to bring to the next POSSIBLE advisory board meeting, fewer, bigger vendor booths, particularly out in the pool areas of both hotels. For a conference full of people who pride themselves on their U/X, the U/X for marketers shouldn’t feel like an endless gauntlet. Another idea, set the ideal ratio of vendors to marketers at three to one and manage registration accordingly, otherwise, we’re gonna need a bigger boat because the sharks are eating the one we’ve got.
3. 7PM Start Time for Fight Club
The WTF 2.0 moment of the conference came with the 7PM scheduled start of the Fight Club on Tuesday evening. Almost everyone had a dinner to go to and Miami Beach ain’t Barcelona. Those dinners, an integral part of doing business at POSSIBLE, also start at 7PM. Making people choose between seeing Terry Kawaja vanquish Michael Kassan on the future of agencies or referees Shenan Reed, Laurie Lam and Todd Kaplan throwing flags on bad BS (quite literally in Kaplan’s case) with their own witty repartee. Richy Glassberg had an interesting suggestion, build out Fight Club with a DJ, a better bar set-up and maybe even combine it with dinner for those don’t have one to go to similar to the way ANA does it. Whatever happens, this event needs to start at 6PM next year. And, Michael Sugar, yes, it was me…
4. The Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc
This is the feedback that is toughest for me. As a gentlemen of a certain age, I grew up revering the James Bond franchise. As any aficionado knows, the opening scene of Goldfinger was filmed at the pool and on balcony of the Fontainebleau’ original Chateau tower. The iconic, Morris Lapidus designed structure is instantly recognizable around the globe. I always request a room in that building whenever I am staying on property. But it, and indeed the rest of the footprint, are not up to the task of hosting 7,500 sellers and buyers for a three day conference. There aren’t enough breakfast and lunch or meeting spots, quiet corners for a quick confab or elevators to meet the surge demand of morning and evening transits. Trésor tower in particular, where all the swells were, left people stranded for twenty minutes or more in their pre-dinner dash to glam up before dinner and many gave up rather than risking getting stranded again on the way back down.
Christian announced the first European edition of POSSIBLE will be in Lisbon in October of 2027 and I suspect I will see many of you there in addition to Miami Beach next year, because, with all it’s quirks, flaws and oddities, POSSIBLE definitely has made itself essential and I come away from it this year invigorated for the future and with a list of follow-ups that will keep me busy until I board my flight for Cannes Lions.