In the end, Jupiter Festival attracted 2,231 attendees, 30% of whom were C-suite or higher, conference organizers said. Although a webpage on B2B event platform Luminik listed expected attendance as 5,000, actual turnout was in line with organizers’ expectations, Mellis and Markgraf said.
“We always thought we were going to be between 2,000 and 3000, and anything over 2,000 for a first-time festival…was what we really wanted to get,” Markgraf said. They declined to specify how many attendees paid the full-price rate or to define their attendance target for next year.
But in the windowless, capacious hall at the Miami Beach Convention Center this week, the buzz didn’t always match the billing. Around mid-morning on Wednesday, the first full day of programming, I arrived to a virtually empty lobby. On the show floor, a jazz duet played to an array of empty seats in front of the bathrooms. An emcee took the stage with gusto as people trickled in with coffees in hand.
The crowd grew thicker later in the day and into Thursday, but multiple attendees, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed the space seemed too big for the number of people. “The space is ambitious,” one person said.
One panel speaker said they were told to expect hundreds of audience members for their onstage session but that only a few dozen turned up.
On the other hand, the smaller volume of people, one attendee said, encouraged more in-depth and productive conversations.
Creating the right conditions for these kinds of conversations was a key focus of Mellis’ and Markgraf’s as they stood up the festival. “The show is fundamentally built for networking from start to finish,” Mellis said. “There’s a lot of design, a lot of psychology that’s gone into it. People will tell you they come for the content, but they really come for networking. They come to build relationships. They come to meet new people. They come to establish partnerships.”
