MAD//FEST 2023 was just that – full of mad energy and the eagerness to learn that those within the marketing and new media space always bring. 

The Digital Voices team were thrilled to attend, and made the most of connecting with kindred minds – the best way to pass the time while waiting for a hefty queue to pass. 

With speaking sessions jam packed with curious attendees, our team made the most of networking with forward thinking brands, testing out exciting tech activations in the space, and of course, enjoying perhaps too many blue cocktails. 

Reimagining the future of sustainability 

Anjali Langford, one of our very own account directors, was particularly intrigued by Will Hodge, Creative Agency Co-Chief & Chief Strategy Officer at Accenture Song UK, and Arla Foods’ CMO Patrik Hansson talk about the future of dairy and the importance of sustainability.

“The key takeaway was that brands need to reimagine the future of food and find ways to make sustainability more human. Ultimately, brands need to find the reasons why and how people will be motivated to act,” she shared. 

From our point of view, Influencer Marketing can play a crucial role when it comes to connecting brands with consumers' values, and to consider how they can play a positive and credible role in people’s lives. When brands use Influencer Marketing to connect with audiences authentically, the trust built between influencers and consumers is a creative and genuine way to motivate action.

Adapt to your customers

Sometimes the things that seem the most obvious end up falling down the list of marketing priorities, so it’s essential to remind ourselves about the basic premises that lead to success and drive results for brands. 

Anjali jumped into a session that explored this fact, featuring Chief Customer Officer at Bloom & Wild, Charlotte Langley as a speaker alongside Mary Keane Dawson. She listened to Charlotte speak about Bloom & Wild’s journey over the past decade, and learned that it is essential to understand your customers’ journey, and make adaptations where necessary based on such.   

If the customer wants it – work towards implementing this to keep them coming back!

The Power of People

Dan Neale, our Senior Account Executive Attended a talk from Tom Rainsford, Marketing Director at Beavertown Brewery. The talk centered around the power of ‘people and culture’ in business, and how a healthy culture is essentially what drives growth.

Our time in the workplace takes up the biggest proportion of our lives of any activity we undertake, and so it’s imperative we build a healthy culture whereby it’s an environment we want to be in.

This starts with being kinder to ourselves and each other. We need to ask ourselves: “What behaviours do we want to be coming back to us?”. We should think twice before emailing a colleague over the weekend or after hours.

Ultimately people want to work with businesses not because of what they offer, but because of how they offer it, and having a healthy culture is central to this, as it reflects both internally, but also externally.

As the madness drew to a close, and with the free bar sufficiently propped up (with the help of the Digital Voices team) the event reminded us that despite the rapid growth of the creator economy, PEOPLE remain at the heart of it.