Can Possible become marketing’s Davos?

Nearly 6,000 people will soon pack their bathing suits and their linen suits and descend on Miami Beach — not for vacation, but for one of the marketing industry’s buzziest conferences.

Marketing doesn’t exactly suffer from a lack of conferences. From tightly curated executive retreats to sprawling trade shows, the calendar is saturated. And yet, in just three years, one newcomer has managed to carve out meaningful space and momentum by positioning itself squarely in the middle.

That event is Possible. According to its founder, Christian Muche, its rise is less about scale and more about solving a structural gap the industry had long ignored. Some gatherings skew intimate but insular. Others sprawl, trading relevance for scale. Many win with certain audiences, but not across all parties.

If its talent lineup, growth and industry buzz are any indication, Possible is bridging those gaps. But for Muche, it’s about growing deliberately and uniquely. Imagine the marketing world’s own Davos, Muche told The Current.

“The idea was not just to launch another event,” he said. “But more to create a platform for the entire marketing, technology, media, culture and creativity world.”

By the numbers

Possible is scaling fast. The inaugural 2023 event drew roughly 2,400 attendees. By year three, that figure had climbed to more than 5,400, with over 6,000 expected this year.

Panels include “The Comeback of the Gen Z Hangout,” “The New Advertising Frontier: The Hotel Media Network” and “Feed the Team: Building Belief at World Cup Scale.”

The conference is expanding its footprint this year to include the Eden Roc, an entire new area with brand activations, several content stages, the famous Nobu restaurant, pools for lounging and even a zen garden.

Key speakers this year will include big names like actor Issa Rae, MediaLink founder and CEO Michael Kassan, Kraft CMO of North America Todd Kaplan, General Motors Chief Growth Officer Norm de Greve and more. Past years have featured Martha Stewart, Pitbull, Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, with leading marketing execs like the Visa CMO Frank Cooper III and BMW CMO Marcus Casey.

The broader industry is taking notice.

On LinkedIn, Leslie Koch, director of growth marketing at 1-800 Contacts, called Possible “perhaps the buzziest marketing conference right now” and “basically a more accessible version of Cannes.”

Keith Weisberg, partner and head of product and technology at 3C Ventures, pointed to Possible’s audience mix as the differentiator: “The room is right. Decision-makers from brands, agencies and technology all in one place.” He also praised the conference’s April timing, when “conversations tend to be more open.”

Others are more skeptical. Marketing strategist and independent analyst Matthew Scott Goldstein posted his thoughts on LinkedIn: “When everyone has to post that they’re attending Possible, it starts to feel more like marketing than momentum.”

That tension, between momentum and permanence, is familiar for any event attempting to break into an entrenched circuit. Muche resists the optics of growth for growth’s sake. “It’s not pushing for numbers per se,” he said. “The more valuable asset is their time.”

Building the ‘missing middle’

Muche began developing Possible in early 2021, as the industry navigated pandemic-era uncertainty. But the opportunity he saw wasn’t just a byproduct of COVID-19 — it was structural.

“You had these conferences … more the boutique events … or the mass events,” he said. “There was nothing in between which would cover the entire marketing world.”

That gap — between intimacy and scale — became Possible’s foundation. Even the name was designed to signal a reset. “We wanted to create a positive momentum for the industry,” Muche explained. “Possible turns everything, every challenge, every problem we have to solve, into a positive momentum.”

Muche’s perspective is shaped by experience. As co-founder of DMEXCO, he helped build one of Europe’s largest marketing events — an exercise in scale that also revealed its limits. Traditional trade shows, he found, are efficient but transactional. Boutique events are high-touch but narrow. Possible is designed to operate somewhere in between: broad in scope, but curated in execution.

That means convening a cross-section of the industry rarely found in one place: brand marketers, agencies, consultancies, creators and technology players. But it wasn’t an easy feat at a time when the industry was just waking up from the pandemic.

From prediction to prescription

Possible is less about optimism than utility. Programs like Possible Connect facilitate thousands of meetings between marketers and partners, turning attendance into actual deal flow. The goal, he adds, is for attendees to leave with tangible outcomes.

“We are organizing up to 3,000 meetings over three days,” Muche said, describing a system built on “double opt-in, confirm[ed] meeting[s] … the best targeted business opportunity we can think about.”

Muche is quick to draw a distinction between speculation and substance. AI looms large on the agenda, but the topic won’t center on experts just predicting what’s to come.

For most AI panels at the typical marketing conference, he said, “It’s still too much guessing what’s next.” The focus, he continued, should instead be on application: “What does it mean really for my business?” Take the panel: “Can AI Crack the Campaign? A Live Creative Experiment.”

And as Weisberg mentioned, the location and timing of the conference plays a large role. Rather than defaulting to legacy conference hubs, the event is anchored in Miami Beach, spanning properties like the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc. The layout is intentional: a centralized footprint that blends indoor and outdoor space, designed to maximize interaction.

“You are not caught in a windowless room all day long,” Muche said. “We are connecting people in many different ways on purpose.”

Muche’s long-term ambition is clear: to make Possible less of an event and more of an institution. Specifically, he points to the World Economic Forum as a conceptual benchmark — not in scope, but in influence.

“It is seen as the most influential platform because the decision-makers are on-site,” he said, “and come together for a couple of days and spend time in really small groups.”

The endgame is not just attendance, but impact. In a crowded conference economy, that may be the only metric that ultimately matters.