Mad//fest, or Madfest for short, is an advertising and marketing conference where speakers declaim that 'brands are dead' or 'brands are God.'
I’m in a draughty old warehouse just off Brick Lane, wearing a lanyard, sipping on a can of blackberry & açaí-flavoured Tenzing, while Ferne McCann from The Only Way Is Essex leads a ‘breathwork session’ for an audience entirely comprised of chief marketing executives, global account managers, senior creative leads and heads of innovation (EMEA region).
As Ferne implores the crowd to inhale, then exhale, to ‘let all of those toxins out’, the attendees emit an anxious splutter that sounds like a dying monster in a Ray Harryhausen movie. It’s an astonishingly weird scene, but one that may sound familiar to anyone who’s ever dipped their toe into the monied, mortifying world of marketing and advertising conferences.
This is MAD//Fest (or Madfest, if you’d prefer) – an industry networking event that presents itself like a music festival, fusing LinkedIn with Lollapalooza, or your office Slack channel with Art Basel. According to its website, Madfest began when ‘a motley crew of marketers, start-ups, disruptors, tech types and media folk started talking about events over a few beers’. Now seven editions in, Madfest gets bigger and bolder every year, taking over the vast Truman Brewery space and a large chunk of Brick Lane – hosting nearly 12,000 attendees and more than 500 speakers.
Having spent my working life in and around the digital media world, where servicing the delusional demands of multinationals is often the only way to stay afloat, I’d long heard tales of similar events. ‘Symposiums’ and festivals in San Francisco and Geneva where men in headsets shout loudly about how ‘brands are dead’, or ‘brands are god’, or how AI is going to destroy the world (and that’s OK). From friends who work full-time in the business, I’d seen leaked WhatsApp videos of on-stage DJs and Meta execs slamming rare mezcal at afterparties in Ace Hotel suites – glimpses of a rich, embarrassing subculture.
So when Madfest came to town, I had to get involved. Partly to gawp at all the weirdness, but also to glean some insight into the personalities and companies that shape our world. Like many writers, I’ve had to segue into this game; mostly copywriting for brands – a vocation that can be as maddening as it is financially rewarding. As the editorial sector dwindles, many ‘creative’ types subsist by either working directly or indirectly for brands – with marketing and advertising agencies acting as counsel, translator, priest and therapist for their often ridiculous ideas. But increasingly Big Data, influencers and AI are front and centre of many brands’ minds – all of which gave this year’s Madfest a sense of tension and uncertainty.
Still, it remains an industry in good health. According to Statista, ad spending worldwide reached almost $733 billion in 2023, up nearly three percent from the previous year. Half of New York, London and Berlin seem to be fighting for the crumbs off this one table, with entire districts constructed in its wake, and I was about to see all the dreams, designs and terrible mistakes of this paranoid empire.
I arrive on day two of Madfest, and events are in full flow. The agenda is loaded with speeches, panel discussions and presentations, a few as short as ten minutes long. Some of the titles would send a shudder from your tailbone to your teeth: ‘BEING BOLD WITHOUT THE BULLSHIT – HOW TO GET CUT THROUGH WHILST STAYING ON BRAND’, ‘F*CK BEING HUMBLE: BUILD UNAPOLOGETIC CONFIDENCE’ and my personal favourite, ‘HOW TO LOSE YOUR VIRGINITY AT 137 YEARS OLD’ (which apparently relates to the cosmetics company Avon becoming an ‘omnichannel business’).
There are appearances from Eddie Izzard and Dan Snow, as well as executives from Uber and Unilever and Just Eat. The median appearance of the punters appears to be ‘blonde or bald’, accessorised by baseball caps, oversized ASOS blazers and shocking pink lanyards displaying their job titles. There are luxury portaloos, bars handing out tins of Liquid Death and Don Julio Tequila (thank you, Diageo) and later, DJ sets from Brandon Block and various other washed-up circuit acts. It’s an impressive set up, which is just as well, because a day ticket here will set you back £995 (plus another £300 in ‘fees’). When I first told an anonymous ad man I was going to Madfest, he cackled, and mentioned that his company expressed interest in hosting a presentation – they were told it would cost them ten grand to do so.
On the Hexagon Stage 1, Ferne McCann is talking about Shoorah, her newly launched mental health app. She speaks about trauma, trolls, tech and how much she relates to Madfest’s theme this year: ‘fortune favours the bold’. Putting her boss lady hat on, she reminds the gathered business folk that ‘for every one pound spent on mental health, employers get a fiver back.’ And without pouring too much scorn on poor Ferne (who may have stumped up £10k to be here), to me this looks very much like profiteering under the guise of care. But this is a common theme at Madfest, and across marketing as a whole. Every ad you see appears to include some kind of baseless nod to diversity or empowerment or self-care, and at Madfest you will find talks like: ‘(BIO)FUELING THE FEMPIRE: MAKING MAGIC FROM LIFE’S MESSIEST MOMENTS’ and ‘CAN AN AI WOMAN SOLVE FOOTBALL’S SEXISM CRISIS?’.
Meaningless mantras are everywhere. I spot a man in a T-shirt that reads ‘Retail Media is More Than Just Onsite’, while stickers declaring ‘there’s a startup for that’ are plastered all over the toilets. I walk into an area called the ‘Connection Lounge’ assuming that the name is some kind of bullshit code for ‘place to charge your phone’, but a stern lady with a tight forehead stops me at the door, and informs me that I will need to receive some kind of briefing and sign a register, if I ‘want to go in and network’. Assuming this will also cost me a lot of money, I make my excuses, but shoot a glance behind her shoulder: all I can see is a few armchairs, mostly taken up by catatonic men in shorts, very much not talking to each other. In another room in the bowels of the old brewery, I stumble on the actual phone-charging area. Nobody here is talking to each other either, instead just staring into the LCD voids of their laptops. In its east London warehouse setting it’s akin to a comedown room in a rave. I decide to go and see a few more talks. First up is Tom Goodwin, author of the tome Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption, and apparently a ‘legend of the industry.’ ‘The reason I’m on stage is because I ask questions,’ he booms, sounding a little like Tom Cruise in Magnolia, before launching into a speech challenging assumed knowledge and the woke habits of the market.
Goodwin claims he drives a Mercedes because it’s a nice car, ‘not because of their position on Palestine.’ He wears a particular brand of Brazilian trainer because they make him feel happy, and his favourite advert of recent years is a slick Roger Federer shoot in the Alps for Moët & Chandon. It’s about as far away from Ferne McCann’s speech as you can get. He tells us that advertising is moving closer to the point of purchase, citing beer ads in pub toilets. On AI, he suggests that while it won’t affect the top end of the advertising industry, it will allow smaller businesses to become their own creative directors. He is a believer in the big boys, and points out that every brand who tried to challenge Unilever and Procter & Gamble quickly collapsed.
Next up is Tom Rainsford, the chief marketing officer at Beavertown Brewery. With his Rick Rubin beard and Northern Quarter man-bun, Rainsford looks exactly how you’d imagine the driving force behind Neck Oil would look. On YouTube, I’d seen his previous Madfest address: ‘HOW BEAVERTOWN THINKS LIKE A BAND, AND NOT A BRAND’ and was expecting something special. Rainsford doesn’t disappoint: he runs on stage like some megachurch pastor, handing out beers into the crowd and saying ‘fuck’ every other word. He preaches about ‘depth over reach’, and tells us about a Beavertown X CALM campaign whereby men’s mental health prompts (such as ‘are you feeling OK mate?’) were inserted in packets of crisps. But it’s his parting shot that really stays with me. He asks the audience to close their eyes, before reading out a mystic incantation: ‘What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.’ And as we open our eyes, he flips it on its head. ‘And if that’s a bit too heavy for you, there’s another way to say it… be like the old Kanye,’ he beams.
Straight after this came a presentation that caught my eye as soon as I saw the lineup: ‘WE’RE IN OUR CREATOR ERA’ – A SWIFTIE’S GUIDE TO EMBRACING CREATORS AND FANDOMS FOR BRANDS.’ The talk is conducted not by a pair of teenage Taylor fans, but by two 40-something women with senior roles at O2 and a major communications company. It turns out to to be a talk about utilising the power of influencers, communicated through the medium of Taylor Swift albums. So Reputation leads us to how ‘we choose our influencers based on clear criteria,’ Fearless pertains to sponsoring the England rugby team, and The Tortured Poets Department relates to their six in-house creators (‘the best job in the world’, according to one of the hosts.) I zone out for most of it, but am brought back to life when they flash up a slide that reads ‘WE TOOK 200 LESBIANS ON A HIKE.’
At this point, I am at my absolute wit’s end, but there is one more show I had to see. ‘THINK LIKE THE MAD MEN, BRIEF LIKE THE SIDEMEN’, hosted by Jordan Schwarzenberger, the manager of KSI’s titular crew, and Tom Fenwick-Smith – a senior creative at Three UK. Schwarzenberger is someone I’ve long been fascinated with, ever since he appeared as a young marketing wiz at VICE around the same time I was there. Since then, he has racked up an impressive reputation, accruing more than 60,000 followers on LinkedIn. On podcasts, he’s regularly referred to as a mastermind and a genius. This year, he was even invited to Downing Street to speak about the ‘creator space’. Influencers are now front-and-centre of many brands’ ideas, and 27-year-old Schwarzenberger has made a lot of money presenting himself as a man who can understand them, an attaché between generations X and Z.
The talk, however, turns out to be a boggy wasteland of clichés, truisms and plain old stating the obvious. ‘Creators are very creative people,’ he muses at one point, while the man from Three says his company’s ‘brand position’ is ‘life needs a big network’. The closest Schwarzenberger gets to anything controversial is expressing frustrations over a client who asked him to ‘add words’ into a TikTok, ‘Stop trying to dictate!’ he cries. ‘That’s the thing that kills creativity.’ It strikes me here that they are talking about KSI like he’s Stanley Kubrick – and nobody here seems to find this remotely galling.
But advertising remains a fascinating industry. It shapes the way in which we spend our money and how we interact with the culture around us. Perhaps naively, though, I can’t help but long for the days when adverts were ambitious and zeitgeist-adjacent. When brands wanted to be irreverent or sexy, rather than worthy and bandwagon-keen.
To find out about the shifts in in the industry, I spoke to Dave*, an experienced advertising creative and copywriter who has worked for major sports brands. ‘I think the answer lies in the way in which capitalism turned into venture capitalism,’ he tells me. ‘If you look at the heyday of advertising, whether that’s the long-form copy of David Oglivy or Jonathan Glazer or Chris Cunningham – the brands they were working with had the sense to make something cool, which is kind of the point.’
‘But now, you’ve got a thousand investors, and a marketing department with 80 idiots in it. Now, the marketing director is more important than the creative director – which means some MBA chump with no taste is calling all the shots.’
‘It’s a meat grinder for ideas,’ he bemoans. ‘You might have a good idea, but it’s like putting your head above the trench at the Somme, it will get shot to pieces by a thousand different idiots – who all need to justify their jobs.’
‘There are still loads of really good adverts in many different forms being made,’ suggests Ryan*, a creative director at an award-winning London agency. ‘But it’s impossible to create something with the impact of something like Jonathan Glazer’s Surfer ad for Guinness. Because back then, you had 20 million people watching Corrie, no internet, and Guinness’s media team weren’t trying to spend money on making content with MOB Kitchen.’
‘I personally pay about £100 a month so I don’t have to hear or see any ads; across Spotify, YouTube, even my Japanese language learning app. Which is insane (for an ad man), but there you go,’ reveals Dave.
Here, something clicks. Perhaps it is that, in this age of hyper-connectivity and deep jadedness, the only way brands can grab our attention is to tug at our empathy strings, to play on our political convictions and our sensation of being overlooked – just as once upon a time they made us feel aroused, or nostalgic, or excited. The image of the girl boss has replaced the Bisto family, the sensitive lad crying into his Gamma Ray is the new Marlboro Man.
As I’m leaving, I notice a girl gang of 20-somethings strutting through the main room like queens of the school disco, all wearing matching tote bags that read: ‘the more people feel, the more people buy.’ Perhaps what Madfest is trying to do is make people ‘feel’ something about advertising again – even if that feeling is intense embarrassment.
