MAD//FEST LONDON RECAP
It’s not about trends. It’s about the tectonic shifts underneath them.
The best ideas don’t come from playbooks. They come from pattern-breakers.
I attended 20 sessions at a UK marketing conference called MAD//Fest and most of the smartest marketing conversations weren’t even on stage. They were in the quiet corners, the rooftop chats and in side-eyes exchanges between people who know the old rules don’t work anymore.
From keynote stages to late-night chats and everything in between: These are the real themes forward-thinking brands are building around. Whether or not they had a stage slot.
Strategic attention is the new conversion.
Community isn’t a tactic - it’s an operating system.
A new era of Influence > Impressions.
Personal brands are the gateway to new audiences.
Relevance is rented, distinctiveness is owned.
Gen Z hates lies - not ads.
Search has shifted from visibility to credibility.
Dynamic adaptability is the antidote.
We’re in a trust reset.
And if your brand still sounds the same as it did 18 months ago, you’re already behind.
1. STRATEGIC ATTENTION IS THE NEW CONVERSION - BUT MOST BRANDS DON’T GET IT
Les Binet [aka the godfather of attention] said it best: “Brands are built in memory. And memory requires attention.”
But most brands are still optimizing for reach instead of resonance.
Across sessions with Havas, Dragonfly AI, and Carat, one thing became clear: attention is no longer about getting noticed. It’s about what people remember. And in an AI-driven world, how that memory is structured through fluent design, schema, placement, and emotion matters more than ever.
Steve King, the CEO of Dragonfly AI broke the illusion:
“Only 24% of the time do people give full attention. You’re designing for chaos, not a captive audience. You need to think about attentional load”
And Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair of Ogilvy explained that two things can be true at once. People say attention spans are dead. They’re not. They’re just selective.
We don’t have less attention — we have less tolerance for low-quality content.
The future isn’t about earning more attention.
It’s about using the slivers you get, more effectively.
2. COMMUNITY IS NOT A TATIC - IT’S AN OPERATING SYSTEM
Chief Brand Officer Nikki Neuburger commented that lululemon doesn’t “own” their community — they facilitate one.
Robert Faulkner, Wrexham AFC’s Chief Business Offers said they didn’t “monetize” a fanbase — they invite people into a story.
Whether it was Lululemon’s CEO literally running with their customers in the Seabreeze Marathon, or Wrexham’s surreal partnerships with brands that don’t even sell in the UK (Stok Cold Brew, anyone?), the message was clear: community is a long game and personal brands are the gateway into new audiences and opportunities.
Because people don’t connect with faceless logos. They connect with the people behind them. They trust humans before they trust brands. This is of course the whole premise behind launching The Brand Audit 4 years ago.
“Do you want a quick return, or a life-changing one?” That question from Lululemon ambassador Charlie Dark hit hard.
Brands that show up consistently with their community and their influencers, not just during the campaign season are the ones earning long-term equity.
The ones trying to “scale” community without showing up? They’re just burning budget on borrowed trust.
3. INFLUENCE > IMPRESSIONS
There’s 3 eras of marketing:
Mass media Era → Where the currency is reach
Personalization Era → Where the currency is effectiveness
Community Era → Where the currency is influence
Most brands are still stuck in era #1 treating influencer partnerships like ad slots. Scripted, controlled, over-edited…and it shows. In my 2025 Social Predictions I encouraged brands to ditch this model. The future of influence lies in letting the talent be the talent. Guardrails over Guidelines.
Real influence happens when people trust people, not when brands try to hijack that relationship for their KPIs.
Fewer and Deeper relationships is the path forward.
Influence is now about association, not just amplification. And data backs it: association with the right person is 5x more effective than traditional channels according to Max Osbourne of This & That. I see that with my own work as a B2B LinkedIn & TikTok creator. Even though I have a small audience of 30K+ I’m often achieving 2-5X the engagement of the brands I partner with and 50% less CPC.
4. RELEVANCE IS RENTED. DISTINCTIVENESS IS OWNED.
Another pertinent reminder came from the Expedia, Abbott and 3 Standard Deviations panel:
“Don’t lose your distinctive assets while chasing the next trend.”
And I agree, too many brands are chasing cultural relevance while erasing their own identity. Smart marketers are remixing their brand codes, not replacing them. You can evolve tone, format, partnerships, but the memory structures need to stay intact.
It’s not about just being trendy. It’s about also still being recognizable as you evolve.
5. GEN Z DOESN’T HATE ADS, THEY HATE BEING LIED TO
A lot of the brand keynotes feel like a badly written LinkedIn post come to life: Safe. Predictable. Polished to the point of irrelevance. But Snap broke the pattern.
Snap didn’t send a CMO. They sent a creator - Benedict Townsend, host of internet news show Scrolling Deep.
And unlike most presenters, he had something many lacked on stage: Personality. Presence. And the ability to actually connect with an audience.
Instead of the typical brand talking points, we got cultural context. As a Gen Z oracle he delivered this one with brutal clarity:
“Don’t pretend it’s not an ad. Don’t fake authenticity. Just be honest and entertaining.”
Gen Z sees through everything. If you're going to show up in their feed, you’d better bring irreverence, values, and actual creativity. Don’t follow and copy the trends, make them your own and subvert them. Don’t perform care, prove that you care. You want them to say “Wow I didn’t think that brand would go there”
And please, please, please learn the Gen Z Lexicon.
6. SEO ISN’T DEAD — BUT YOUR STRATEGY MIGHT BE
Search has shifted from visibility to credibility.
James Bentham, the Head of SEO at Havas broke down the shifts happening in SEO right now, and why most marketers are stuck in a 2015 playbook. Organic traffic may be down by up to 64% in some industries, but here’s the twist: search traffic is now 4.4x more valuable than other sources. The intent is higher. The buyer is more ready. The problem? Most brands aren’t ready for them.
Bentham contrasted the old and the new:
→ Traditional SEO | focused on crawlability, mobile UX, site speed, and readability.
→ AI-era SEO | prioritizes schema, semantic relevance, internal linking, JavaScript execution, and external signals that establish trust.
He urged brands to stop optimizing for pages and start optimizing for passages — because search engines are now pulling granular content snippets, not just indexing full pages.
Digital PR is also making a comeback. Backlinks, social media content, social media mentions, and third-party validation are going to matter even more as AI rewires the way we discover and decide. SEO is no longer a silo. It’s your reputation engine.
If your content strategy doesn’t reflect that? You’re not just invisible — you’re irrelevant.
I said this in my 2024 keynote at the B2B Marketing Expo — The Future of Search is Social. And I meant it. Social media is shaping discoverability in ways traditional marketers still underestimate. One year later, I can’t help but ask: How many B2B brands actually took that advice?
7. WE’RE IN A TRUST RESET
One of the most unexpected [and most powerful] sessions paired comedian Jimmy Carr with Ogilvy Vice Chair Rory Sutherland. What started as laughs quickly turned into sharp cultural commentary.
Rory opened by comparing marketing to Lidl: obsessed with efficiency, stripped of emotion, reduced to performance spreadsheets. But the best marketing? It’s chaotic. Experimental. A bit irrational. More TK Maxx than Lidl.
Jimmy added this mic-drop moment:
“No one remembers my jokes. They remember how I made them feel. It’s the same with marketing.”
It all comes back to trust and not just in your message, but in the feeling you create. Brands are too busy optimizing for performance and forgetting the human. I always tell my clients:
“Customers buy with emotion and then justify with ration. You need to bake in emotional triggers into your content” - Christina Minshull, CEO - The Brand Audit
We don’t need more clever copy. We need more credibility.
We don’t need more reach. We need more resonance.
Because we’re not in a trend cycle — we’re in a trust reset. And the brands that survive this shift won’t be the loudest. They’ll be the ones that feel the most human.
8. DYNAMIC ADAPTABILITY IS THE ANTIDOTE
“75% of brands could disappear tomorrow and absolutely no one would care.”
This was shocking research shared by Havas Chief Strategy Officer Mark Sinnock. That’s the inconvenient truth and the existential wake up that brands need.
Most brands aren’t meaningful. They’re just… there.
In this new era dynamic adaptability is the antidote to boring.
Due to economic and societal conditions people are more thoughtful and considered in their purchase decisions. The brands winning today they’re not just selling products. They’re adapting in real time, co-creating with their communities, and building with culture not just chasing it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
If there’s one thing MAD//Fest 2025 made clear, it’s this:
Marketing is emotional. It’s behavioural. It’s Human. It’s not always scalable or neatly attributable in the way most CMOs and CFOs want it to be.
The brands that will win?
→ They’ll build memory, not just awareness.
→ They’ll empower community, not just collect followers.
→ They’ll trade in trust, not just impressions.
→ And they’ll show up with actual values — not just value props.
This is the new brand era. It’s messier. Slower. More meaningful.
The ones who embrace it won’t just earn attention — they’ll earn affection.
The rest? Lost in the scroll.
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