Our industry is often in a scramble, juggling with changing regulations, technical updates, creative trends to jump on, and businesses to grow means sight of the horizon is often lost. Events such as MadFest act not just as good networking opportunities but almost a reframing of longer-term themes we as digital marketers need to be aiming for.
The prevailing digital winds are now well known with distant echoes of “Gen AI” and “they’re taking our cookies from us” echoing around the walls of the Old Truman Brewery, but is there something tangible we can take away from these discussions, or at the very least help us pull together plans to give the illusion of having our ducks in a row?
Creative was one of the more engaging and penetrable ideas to surface itself in several talks. The methods in which brands can stand out and show their colours have never been greater with the plethora of channels and devices at their disposal, however, there seems to be a degree of decision paralysis and risk aversion at play. The stranglehold of “it works for them so it’ll work for us” forces many brands to regress towards the mean of creativity, or lack thereof.
Daniel Murphy, SVP Marketing at Liquid Death gave an engaging talk on the subject of creativity, and how the real gold comes from pushing down the perceived “wrong paths”. Naturally, there’s a degree of freedom required to pursue this strategy and may not work for more established, corporate brands, however, Daniel elaborated on how the brand had used shock tactics to turn beverage advertising on its head with their humorous approach to being remembered. Now, we can’t in good faith recommend that vigorously shaking a can of water into your mouth as a double entendre thinly veiled as a fitness fad would work for all brands, but you take the point that it’s impactful.
Speakers throughout the day echoed similar points (albeit less overtly disruptive) and emphasised the need for any brand marketer worth their salt to think outside the box and feverishly plan some zany storytelling to help them win in the evermore competitive marketplace. Despite having reportedly reached “peak stuff” as a species, a sprinkling of human creativity is enough to capture even the most ad-blind audience's imagination.
Now it’s impossible for anyone to attend a marketing event in 2024 without the most overused and least understood acronym, AI, being crowbarred into every talk. Don’t get me wrong, AI in different guises is the future of marketing, but change can be scary and I don’t believe that many jobs are at risk anytime soon. As repeated as it is, lean into AI.
I view it as a labour-saving device rather than replacing the human element of marketing. Adtech has exploded to over 14,000 tools available to digital teams (43% are never used regularly), and the consolidation offered by AI solutions will reduce the context switching and heavy lifting between platforms. We’re better off aiming for a cyborg, an unholy Frankenstein of man and machine, rather than a fully autonomous robot in modern marketing. Taking the scale and efficiency gained from gen AI certainly grows brands’ capabilities to test strategies and creative variations, however, leave the imagination to us humans.
Wrapping up those key themes is of course the death of the (THIRD PARTY ONLY) cookie. Apologies for the directness, but the distinction between cookies is important and often miscommunicated. After yet another delay to the dreaded deprecation, it’s easy to let this slip to the back of the mind, however, MadFest did a great job of keeping the conversation ongoing and relevant. Whether it’s building your contextual targeting approach or adopting new ID solutions, deterministic targeting is shrinking and we are moving from precision to prediction kicking and screaming. Google’s Topics API could be part of the puzzle, check out what Topics Google has bucketed you into by going to chrome://topics-internals and hit calculate now and judge for yourself how much value that will be adding.
MadFest in summary is just that, a little mad. An explosion of industry professionals holding digital communion and each pushing their own points of view and agendas upon brands, agencies and other tech providers alike. Thankfully there was a little more “fest” than “mad” which made for an informative time, all whilst connecting with colleagues from all over the advertising world. My advice for anyone looking to attend next year is to pick your talks and plan your day wisely, as it’s very easy to get distracted by the sensory overload. As ever it was a brilliant event, as after all, marketing is a human industry, and in the age of AI, we need to hold onto as many human interactions as possible.
Until next year!
