MAD FEST 2024: Bold Shirts, Badass Speakers & Free Beers
MAD FEST 2024
MAD//:
A culmination of the greatest creative minds in marketing, taking place in the heart of British culture, Shoreditch, feels like a match made in heaven. And to give MAD//FEST their credit… it was.
This isn’t going to be a classic review of an event that just lists chronologically what I went to. Boring. I’d rather take you through my thoughts on the event as a whole and share some key takeaways from what I heard from the creative leaders in this mad industry we call marketing.
Most interesting things I saw:
How often do you get to have an intimate session with someone who leads the creative at a brand that originally inspired you to get into marketing? (The finger through the wall Dorito ad – brilliant.) Hearing from Matt Watson, the ECD for Pepsi, it was one of the only sessions that offered clear and actionable steps on how to encourage creativity within a business. He talked about the power of flipping ‘no’ to ‘no, but what if…’ and the overall importance of culture on creative freedom. Not the culture of free coffee or ping pong tables, but the culture of non-ego idea sharing and the freedom to fail.
The Global Brand Director for Cadbury’s (Guilherme Ferreira) sharing how the answer to the future lay in the brand's origins. A theme that came up in nearly all the major brands' talks I attended. Rather than innovating and claiming to be someone they weren’t, Cadbury (as did Specsavers Liz Baines, Jägermeister Christian Stindt & Guinness Anna MacDonald) spoke about how their biggest changes in branding came from adopting the work of the original founders. A beautiful talk in partnership with VCCP culminated in a showing of the 200-year anniversary ad that used archived photos from real people who had family photos showing the brand over the last 200 years. It genuinely nearly brought a tear to my eye. Exceptional marketing.
Liquid Death’s statement: “Don’t plan the jump. Stitch the parachute as you’re going down.” This is probably the coolest brand in the world right now and (again, a theme throughout) hearing them talk about idea sharing, failing, and just simply trying filled me with hope that other brands will look on and be more prepared to take a leap of faith. The whole tagline for the event was ‘Fortune Favours the Bold’ and I don’t think anything exemplifies this statement more than what Liquid Death has done in the last four years. Daniel Murphy
What was good about the event?
Good: The level of marketing leaders in the room. An overwhelming amount of C-suite level marketing and brand professionals talking about real strategies and stories – not being sold to by an agency.
Bad: With so many creative partners exhibiting, a common theme at these sorts of events is great ideas with bad execution. The partnering exhibitors had interesting stories to tell, but the lack of experiential and playful elements in the stands meant that guests would walk past and not engage with what could have been an awesome future partnership for them.
Much like Big John ‘Bosh’ Fisher, here are my key takeaways:
Firstly, experiential is still hugely under-represented within the marketing space. I would even go so far as to say there is a lack of definition of what an experiential campaign actually is. The only talk at the three-day event about experiential was an incredible talk with the MD of Seen Presents Louisa O'Connor (experiential agency) and Netflix Cali Christians. When questioned about experiential, nearly all of the Marketing Directors would immediately bring up OOH, Digital, or Influencer strategies. It was a common theme that brands wanted to be more consumer-focused, and in my opinion, there is no more prevalent way of connecting a brand to its audience than with an experiential campaign. This gives me hope for the future of experiential and is actually rather exciting, as this seemingly new-age way of marketing feels like it’s approaching a rise in popularity with Marketing Directors.
Depth vs Reach was an incredible line mentioned by Tom Rainsford, the Marketing Director for Beavertown Brewery (Neck Oil Kings). It feels as though the value of ‘good’ marketing is leaning towards a state of – fewer – bigger – better – which means that the competition for quality increases. In a world where attention is the new currency, it was really refreshing to hear a brand leader talking about the value of the impact of the attention, rather than just how many people have ‘seen’ your thing. This nicely bleeds into the future for physical experiential campaigns – capturing the feeling of your audience and curating an experience for them vs a cheap win influencer campaign that is shoe-horned to get the most views.
Finally, the final point to note is a two-parter. Play in your lane. The aspect of humour, playfulness, and overall silliness was a theme that kept occurring throughout the brand talks, but the importance of this works only when you know the lane your brand can operate in. Don’t talk on International Women’s Day if you’ve never shared stories of female success, and don’t poke fun at the government if you’ve never stood up for something else politically in the past. The list goes on. It feels as though brands are understanding the need to make genuinely entertaining content, and humour is at the heart of this. So, play is encouraged. But this can only work when brand leaders are prepared to fail, prepared to learn, and most notably – when ideas come from passion, rather than hierarchy.
Overall, MAD Fest was wicked.
Get a bold shirt, meet a badass speaker, and pick up some free beers next year.
See you there.
Ollie Biddle, Marketing Manager – Collaborate Global