MAD//Fest London uncut
Attention is dead. Long live trust.
MAD//Fest is “the UK’s biggest, boldest + most distinctive marketing/advertising festival”, running annually since 2018.
This year’s theme was the industry’s candle in the wind—‘the human touch’:
“We’re bringing together the best humans in the business to reclaim what sets us apart, and explore how to leverage the best tech + innovation to gain a marketing edge, rather than serve up generic slop.”
As a brand-strategist it sounds like a no brainer to attend. Who doesn’t want to be considered bold and distinctive? To be seen to be having their ‘finger on the pulse’ of industry innovation? Well, plenty of brands apparently, but that aside…
The economics of going to big conferences are not easy to compute as solo-entrepreneur. Time and energy are my most precious resources, so investing them into an event without any guaranteed ROI beyond content for a LinkedIn post, needs to be considered carefully.
I paid an arm and a leg to attend the inaugural MAD//North in Manchester in March (recap still pending 🫠), so I was on the mailing list for a free ticket to this one. The business model seems to be to give away sponsor-supported free tickets up until a few weeks before and then it’s the last minute suckers who have to pay.
(So if you want to attend the next one for free, sign up to their mailing list now, or if you have relationships with any sponsors or exhibitors, they also get allocations of free tickets)
I wasn’t looking for hard returns in terms of connections made or potential clients met—but it’s not exactly prime prospecting territory for my target client base either (Senior B2B business leaders who want to build their own brands, not just their employer’s). Despite being a B2B event itself, full of B2B sponsors, it doesn’t attract the B2B crowd in anywhere near the same numbers (although it should).
Anyway the ticket was free, and I am a big proponent of increasing my luck surface area, so I split the difference and attended for 1.5 days of the 3 day agenda. Was it worth it? Yes. Would I pay for it? Not sure. I think in order to get the most out of these things you need to prepare and go in intentionally…
Speaking of intention, I’ve decided to make the most of my London trips from now on by trying as many viral food and beverage sensations as I can fit into each visit. I have a bucket list saved on instagram for every city in the UK, and London overfloweth.
Keep an eye out for my upcoming London Diaries post for my review of Cup + Lid’s Iced Tiramisu, Crunch’s Patty Melt, and Gordon Ramsay’s Bread Street Kitchen.
Read on for summaries of all the sessions I attended (by stage) and the ones I missed that I’ll be looking out for on the MAD//Fest YouTube channel.
Disruption with Havas
Spotlighting challenger brands at every stage of their journey.
The Science of Desire: Decoding the very human system that powers growth
Mark Sinnock, Havas & Lea Karam, Mindscope
People have filtering spans, not just attention spans — audiences are becoming ever more discerning about what they let in
Every interaction is a test: brands earn micro-deposits or take micro-transactions (of trust) with each touchpoint
The shift is away from campaigns and toward cultural infrastructure — building something ongoing, not one-off
All the content from this presentation is available as a report to download on Havas’ Science of Desire website.
LEON founder John Vincent meets Rory Sutherland
The Gorton fallacy: Most businesses don’t understand the downstream impacts of removing people from systems
John Vincent’s lens is energy-first (meaning love and wholeness). His priority stack: Energy → Purpose → Product → Business model → Team → Customers → Economics
Book recommendations: R.S. → Obliquity, John Kay, and J.V. → Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler
Sadly missed on the Havas stages:
How Nothing is Making Tech More Human
Charlie Smith, Nothing & Amy O’Brien, Vogue Business
From Worthy to Wanted: Re-branding sustainability in today’s context
Darsh Myronidis, Global Sustainability Leader & Rosie Kitson, Havas
Where Passions Collide: Why gaming sits at the centre of culture
David Duffield, Livewire
Secret Lives of Ad Women – would we lie to you?
Nicky Bullard, ELEVATOR; Dawn Paine, Aurora & Elliot Moss, Mischon de Reya
The Tech Identity Crisis
Mark Lester, Squint Consulting & Kyle Anthony Fiore, Booking.com
The Inaugural Sutherland Lecture
Rory Sutherland
"There should always be two marketing people on the board. A lone marketer on the board can never break the consensus against the counter-intuitive ideas."
– Rory Sutherland
Hexagon Stage with Kantar
Home to the biggest brands and the boldest creative voices exploring how empathy, emotion and human insight are shaping the future of brand marketing.
The Future of Brandland
Pete Markey, Uni of Nottingham; Sandie Dilger, PROPER Snacks; Emma Turner, IHAR & Robin Jaffray, R&D Partners
The CMO role is either expanding, collapsing or evolving into something closer to a CTO
The Myth of Adland is dying: entertainment's influence, quality, and creativity are shifting the balance, agencies are diminishing relative to in-house
Understanding the actual business challenge is what matters, not the channel
The real opportunity is agency and in-house strategists working in collaboration: combining internal + external cultural views, human + data insight, and systems thinking to tie it all together
Side note:
I couldn’t help but wonder (scoff) at this idea that ad/creative agencies are always the first port-of-call for creativity, innovative ideas and cultural landscape insight. As if in-house talent have none of this? Are not culturally engaged? Are not creative? None of the in-house brand people I know lack for any of the above.
Sure, there is a tendency for what Jaffray described as “intelligent naivety” to be lacking internally, for the in-house teams to be focused on the as-is, rather than the could-be. But that’s often not for lack of talent or motivation to push the status quo. In my experience it was the repeated lack of confidence from leadership that hamstrung the creativity and innovation of brand and marketing more than anything—the reliance on agencies to have the answers, and the favour/credibility those answers were always given over and above any internal ‘opinion’.
Can’t say I’ll be shedding any tears for Adland perpetuating myths like this, or any other self-aggrandising bullshit, tbh.
Sadly missed on the Hex stage:
10 Myths about AI and advertising, what it all really means and what to do about it?
Tom Goodwin, All We Have is Now
Algorithms, Advertisers, Toxic Content: Standing Up for Humanity
Louis Theroux & Katie Derham, BBC
How to lead well through high stakes
Margaret Jobling, NatWest Group & Sally Henderson, High-Stakes Leadership
It takes a team to tell a story
Ginny Nackvi, Samuel Sutton and Livi West, Dishoom
“Ideas transform businesses, not tech.”
– Sandie Dilger
AI & Innovation Stage with Sprinklr
What AI is actually doing to brands and creativity e.g. brand visibility to LLMs, human-versus-machine creative balance, and the organisational fallout of AI adoption.
Your brand didn’t say that. AI did. Dr Cecilia Jones in conversation with Iesha White.
13 words on Reddit can influence, or be used against, a brand within 24 hours
LLMs are picking up and summarising incorrect data or misinformation (data poisoning): they do not understand truth — they’re good at surfacing what appears a lot, what appears useful, and what appears human
Other risks include impersonation of brands, fraud, corporate espionage and sabotage
Precedent-setting cases are pushing toward LLMs being held liable, currently playing out across Germany, the US, and the UK
AI Engine Management (AEM) is emerging as a discipline: brand offence now matters as much as defence and the best offence is doubling down on the fundamentals i.e. creating good content, legible to both humans and machines
Have you asked ChatGPT or Claude about your brand lately?
Sadly missed on the AI & Innovation stage:
The human hand in AI: The case for designed imperfection
Max Ottignon, Ragged Edge & Jack Cully, Granola
“Don’t let the AI tell your story.”
– Dr Cecilia Jones
Female Leader’s Club
A dedicated space for women’s leadership and career development run by and for women in the industry.
Building Brand You
Amelia Sordell, Klowt
The framework for a profitable personal brand: POV (USP), Personality, Proof, Product
Curriculum Vitae = latin for ‘course of life’ i.e. your CV and your LinkedIn bio should tell a story
Self-deprecation, mistakes and failure perform well because they build trust
You should be posting 3 types of content on LinkedIn each week: know me, like me and respect me
Side note:
I didn’t include all the sessions I attended here, because I over-indexed on the female leader’s club. From a practical point of view I wanted to learn about the methodologies of other personal brand strategists as well as leadership advice I could pass on to my clients, but overall I found the sessions a bit hit and miss. Amelia’s was by far the standout.
Very disappointingly of MAD//Fest’s organisation: it was noted several times over that this stage was the poor cousin of the festival. There was no festival branding, it was one of the hottest spaces, and had loud noise bleeding in from the sound system of the stage next door. It contained roughly a third of the chairs it actually needed, with every session overflowing to standing room only. Make of that what you will about the forecasted demand for this content.
Sadly missed at the Female Leader’s Club:
Quit to Grow: The discipline of knowing when to leave
Sedge Beswick, Sedge Consulting
“Community isn’t going to pay your bills.”
– Amelia Sordell
What I would do differently next year
I just read a recap of Cannes Lions from WELLTH by Danielle Leslie and she made several excellent points about how to prep to make the most of that event, all of which apply here, and none of which I did (lol).
And ok, MAD//FEST is no Cannes—although it did turn Brick Lane into a ‘beach’—but it does have a lot of the same elements and it still requires a hefty dose of stamina.
Her advice was:
RSVP for events and activations in advance
Take care of yourself before arriving
Don’t stress over your outfits and fashion
Set simple, embodied intentions
So here’s what I’m doing for the next MAD//Fest (or the next big conference):
Instead of pre-loading my trip with loads of socialising and catch-ups the weekend before, I’d do the opposite, so I’m fresher for the event
I would attend all three days and be more strategic about the sessions I went to and who I was likely to bump into in the audience
I would do my research about the networking and side events, drinks and parties, plan around them and RSVP beforehand
I would proactively reach out to my network earlier to set-up more catch-ups beforehand, either with prospects or industry peers I wanted to learn from
I highly recommend reading Danielle’s Cannes recap for more detail on her approach:
Thanks ….. will read all in a quiet moment 😊👋