How Eating With Tod's audience filled Twickenham Stadium for FUME BBQ Festival with no paid media - and what it tells brands about what a creator audience is really worth.
Reach is easy to buy and easy to measure, which is why most brands still judge creators on it. The harder question - the one that separates a media buy from an actual asset - is whether an audience will move. Not watch. Move. Leave the house, cross London, pay for a ticket and queue in the rain for brisket.
In June, FUME BBQ Festival sold 17,500 tickets across four days at Twickenham Stadium. The Saturday sessions went within six weeks of launch. Everything else was gone months before the gates opened. Total paid media spend: zero.
The curve is the story, not the number
The first FUME was 4,000 people in Peckham. The year after, FUME ran three events and did around 20,000 across all of them. This year a single site sold 17,500 across four days - which makes FUME currently the fastest-growing food festival in the UK and the largest BBQ festival in Europe.
None of that growth was bought. It was built on Eating With Tod's 2.5 million-strong Instagram audience, and on the fact that the same audience turned up the first time and came back.
What people were actually buying
Not a festival. A recommendation from someone with a track record.
Tod has spent years telling people where to eat and being right about it. That is the entire mechanism. An audience that has taken your advice, acted on it and had a good time develops something a media plan cannot manufacture: the assumption that the next thing you point at will also be good. Ticket sales are simply the point where that assumption gets priced.
It's why the lineup mattered more than the marketing. FUME flew KG BBQ and Interstellar in from Austin - the latter Michelin-starred - and The Chicken Baptiser from South Carolina. That roster is expensive and logistically horrible, and it is the reason the trust holds. The audience had watched Tod eat this food for years. Putting it in front of them was a promise being kept, not a lineup being announced.
The exhibitor list is the second proof
If the ticket sales show the audience will move, the brands that came show the commercial market had worked out the same thing.
Travel Texas partnered with us - a state tourism board backing a London food festival, because the Austin pitmasters on site were making the case for Texas more persuasively than a campaign could. The grill and live-fire category arrived in force: Weber, Kamado Joe, Char-Broil, Pit Boss, Petromax, ProSmoke BBQ, Globaltic, Flint & Flame and Stalwart Crafts. Drinks followed - Meantime Brewing, Mount Gay, Brother's Bond Bourbon and Sapling Spirits - alongside challenger brands including Good Phats and Medahuman.
What those brands bought wasn't impressions. It was a few hours of undivided attention from 17,500 people who had already decided they cared about live fire, in a setting where the product could be lit, used, poured and tasted rather than described. That is a very hard environment to buy your way into, and it only exists because someone spent years building the audience that fills it.
The uncomfortable part for brands
You cannot rent this.
A creator with genuine distribution is not a channel you can book for a quarter and switch off. The asset was accumulated over years of being right in public, and it degrades the moment it's pointed at something the audience wouldn't have chosen. Every brand that has ever handed a creator a locked script has spent down that asset on their behalf.
The practical implication is about sequencing, not budget. Brands tend to arrive at a creator when there's something to sell, which is the exact moment the audience is least receptive. The work that made 17,500 tickets move was done in the years before there was anything to buy.
What this changes about the media plan
Most brands are still measuring creators against paid social - cost per thousand, cost per click, cost per acquisition - and on those terms creators often look expensive.
They're the wrong terms. Paid social rents attention and stops the day the budget does. A creator audience is owned distribution that appreciates if you look after it. The question to ask isn't what a post costs against a CPM. It's a harder one, and a better one: if we asked this audience to do something inconvenient, would they?
For most brands the honest answer is no. That gap is the whole opportunity.
FUME BBQ Festival returns in 2027. If you're a brand thinking about creator-led work that has to produce something more demanding than impressions, .