Like many good ideas, MAD//Fest came to fruition in a pub.A motley crew of marketers, start-ups, disruptors, tech types + media folk started talking about events over a few beers. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if there was an event that actually brought together the great + the good? Something that packs a punch with no-nonsense, relevant content? A space where people can have a bit of fun rather than fall asleep in the back row? And so, three pints in, MAD//Fest was conceived, and a decision was made (with a little Dutch courage) to quit our jobs + launch a marketing/advertising festival that no corporate would dare. To cut a long story short, from relatively humble beginnings in 2018 (2,000 attendees), we’ve grown fast to become the UK’s biggest, boldest + most distinctive marketing/advertising festival. We’ve got stacks of innovation awards, happy clients + magical stories of people coming together + forging new partnerships (plus a few extra grey hairs). We survived COVID and were the industry’s first In Real Life event to return in July 2021. How? By staging MAD//Fest in a Shoreditch car park, which became the playbook of the multi-location summer festival it is today. Another good thing came out of COVID – we teamed up with a good friend + industry legend to launch MAD//Masters by Rory Sutherland – a hybrid learning experience designed to help marketers, commercial leaders + entrepreneurs use behavioural science + creativity to solve business challenges + drive growth. And whilst we still haven’t had any in the Antarctic complete the course, MAD//Masters has a large + enlightened alumni in all four corners of the globe.2024 was a big year for us. Not only did we host our most ambitious festival to date with 12,000 attendees across a 1/4sqm of real estate at the Truman Brewery, we also became part of The Ingenuity Group. This exciting chapter of the MAD//Fest story has enabled us to scale our ambition and take MAD//Fest UpNorth to Manchester in 2025 as we go about our mission to connect the marketing world.