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Last week, European creator management firm Arcade held the region’s first-ever media upfront in London. It’s a sign of where the creator economy is headed: over the last year, creators have been pulled into TV and streamers’ upfront and NewFronts negotiations, while companies like Spotter, Forbes, Walmart, and the International Advertising Bureau (IAB) have held their own creator-centric versions of the traditional media sales event.

Those experiments are exposing a structural problem: the traditional TV upfront model doesn’t map neatly onto the creator economy. Creator inventory is effectively unlimited and scattered across thousands of channels, so the creator upfront negotiations that are starting to emerge are being built by creator-first firms and aggregators around small rosters of marquee talent, not the broader creator economy. 

Arcade’s Sept. 17 event was both a sales pitch for several of its biggest creators and the company’s take on the future of creator media. IAB’s CreatorFronts leaned more toward a state-of-the-market update and the limitations of the creator economy’s half-built infrastructure. Spotter’s CTV event earlier this year was about selling its YouTube inventory. 

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Shoppers no longer need to be in an owned-retailer environment to complete a purchase, prompting brands to fundamentally rethink their retail media strategies.

The emergence of new purchasing pathways — especially social and agentic commerce — is leading to environments where discovery and purchase happen simultaneously. With purchasing journeys becoming increasingly non-linear and fragmented, brands and retailers are pivoting from siloed attribution models to unified, incrementality-based measurement to capture full-funnel value.

“The traditional idea of a static media funnel has significantly evolved,” said Moody Khan, vp, RMN measurement strategy at Circana. “There was a heavy focus on engaging shoppers and driving them down the funnel. It’s not that this doesn’t exist anymore, but there are moments where the funnel collapses. For brands, this means thinking about their media strategy differently: understanding where their shoppers are engaging today and where they’re converting, and evolving with them.”

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