MAD//Fest 2024: How brands can push their culture forward with bold storytelling, briefing and creatives

Kritisha Thapa, who is currently enrolled on our paid internship programme, recently attended MAD//Fest 2024. In this blog, she shares the key learnings from the day for brands and agencies.

“Fortune favours the Bold” an ancient proverb that suggests one should act boldly and bravely to accomplish greatness. But what does that even mean to marketers, agencies and brands and how can one achieve boldness in such a vast industry? This was the main topic that industry leaders ventured to tackle at this year’s Mad//Fest by addressing concerns on how it is not enough to just think outside the box and that being ‘bold’ requires strategic thought/planning and should be built into the brands culture from the initial stages of its development.

Rachel Kerrone – Brand and Marketing Director of Starling Bank, builds on this by discussing how the brand has maintained its relevancy as an innovative digital challenger brand. She highlighted how young challenger brands such as Starling should retain big brand strategies and behave like a big brand from the start, cultivating a reputation that consumers can identify with consistently. But first you must capture your audience’s attention, and this requires us to draw back to the actual core concept of a campaign, the briefing element.

Dani and Kate, co-founders of Just Add Joy, expanded on this by emphasising the importance of a good brief and how it can unlock creator marketing’s immense potential. Creative briefs should be carefully catered to the creator and should not be rushed. They should be clear, concise and thoughtfully organized to make sure it’s right the first time; measure twice, cut once.

Now when it comes to the creative itself, we know how much a great creative can impact consumer attention and brand outcomes. But what is it that truly makes people pay attention? Matt Butts – Measurement and Insights lead from WeTransfer, talked about how those whose “happiness “or “surprise” increased after ad exposure on WeTransfer are more likely to deliver stronger impact than those with negative/neutral emotion with at least a +50% increase in brand perception. Therefore, implementing elements into a creative that induce such emotions should be an essential priority for optimizing campaigns.

This is evident for us at Talon too. From our creative testing research, we see that consumers are much more drawn to facial imagery than product, and creatives that use facial imagery see a +21% stronger level of attention. 

However, it’s crucial to understand the difference between one-off surface level impacts of a campaign vs quality, long-term strategic engagement. Emerging from a panel discussion between Rory McEntee – Brand & Marketing Director from Gymbox and Dom Boyd Managing Director at Kantar, on the topic of attention deficit. Dom pointed out that brands cannot always rely on PR stunts to drive attention because it is about balancing between traditional brand building values vs just performing stunt moves that add to the brand. You must think about how you can link the stunt back to your own brand.  

Bharat Sharma – Chief Operating Officer at MCanvas, adds to this by highlighting that innovation is not a onetime thing, you must consistently keep spending money and effort on these creatives to see results. This is why drawing a connection between the campaign and the brands story is what truly makes a meaningful impact on consumers and the brands’ culture.

Ginny Nackvi – Head of Brand & Creative at Dishoom, shared an inspirational demonstration of how Dishoom preserves the heritage of Bombay by writing stories that are deeply rooted in the Bombay history and culture, giving a refreshing insight into how brands should aim to “deepen not dilute” their story when expanding the business on a larger scale. Each franchise of Dishoom has its own unique story to tell, adding to the overall Dishoom experience and this is the mindset that all brands and agencies should encompass when collaborating. This is achieved by creating campaigns that build on the overarching theme, approach or story of your brands identity. 

Being mindful of your audience is a fundamental aspect of success or fortune within this business. Producing a campaign that genuinely resonates with people is no simple feat, but Gary Raucher – EVP of ASICS, exhibited how they are breaking the rules of this game. Within the world of sport and exercise it has always been highlighted that the only things that matter is the winning moments and physical gains, but ASICS advocated how it can also benefit the mind. Greatness is not defined by a certain number or personal best but how exercise makes you feel. By changing the narrative around sport and movement they are relating to regular everyday people whilst promoting the wellbeing of athletes and people over winning.

It’s evident that achieving boldness within this industry requires a lot of intentional effort and strategy. However, continuously exploring ways to break category conventions by forging your own path and bringing some specialism to the business is what can really differentiate your brand from others. By working with great partners with similar goals and objectives you can expect to create exceptional campaigns that attracts authentic and long-term engagement from consumers. It was really inspiring to see how industry leaders at Mad//Fest are approaching marketing with a bold flair and I am excited to see what the future holds for this aspect of the business.