This year’s MAD//Fest ushered in a new era for trusted publishers and creators, our Associate Creative Director, Emma McKernan reports. This article first appeared in Little Black Book here.
When you have to theme your festival ‘The Human Touch’, as a way of ‘reclaiming what sets us apart’ from AI, it really is hard for that to not sound like mass panic about our future job prospects.
But I came away from last week’s MAD//Fest feeling oddly optimistic. Inspired, motivated, and dare I say, excited.
I don’t think this is a case of ‘creative person feels inspired by other rose-tinted creative folk’, either. When Sir Martin Sorrell (who we all know isn’t one to pull punches) is calling the human factor in creativity ‘more important than ever’ in the short-to-medium term, then we might just be onto something.
And, certainly from a Smarts perspective, it was refreshing hearing speaker after speaker champion the value of premium media, trusted publishers and creators. These sources have spent years earning the thing that AI can’t generate: audience trust.
MAD//Fest seemed to show that the wider industry is waking up to something people working within the PR and earned space have known and championed for a while. That understanding where and how people choose to place their trust is becoming just as important as understanding where they spend their time.
Refluenced’s Joe Adsett argued that marketers in general have been “overcomplicating things for too long”, believing most of the things we buy aren’t because of a perfectly optimised funnel, but because somebody we trust mentioned them.
Meanwhile, Christina Habib, chief insights officer at Unilever, made the case that “brands that keep winning tomorrow won’t only have the right data, signals and algos”, they’ll have “the awareness, audacity, intuition and strategic discernment to keep constant sight of who they’re for.”
For creatives working in our industry, that makes elevating craft more important. Creators Benedict Townsend and Becky Bambino both discussed how they’ve seen their own YouTube content transition from phone screens to TV screens, and have therefore invested heavily in craft and production to ensure they’re giving their audience the respect they deserve.
And Ben Richards, global head of experience, OLA of The LEGO Group, pointed out that whilst the toolbox has suddenly become much bigger, ‘craft is always at the heart’ of LEGO Group, so his job is about expanding what’s possible.
As for agencies, Oliver Yonchev, co-founder of the collective AI company Potentially, was one of many who advised agencies to start redefining roles around judgment instead of capabilities. And The AA’s Head of Brand Marketing, Ria Purser, added: “Creatives focused on judgement, taste and the instinct to know when something is right is what stops good work becoming slop,”
But for a festival full of optimism, let’s end on a word of caution, from criminal psychologist and AI futurist Dr Julia Shaw. As an industry, we need to avoid “deskilling, mis-skilling or never-skilling” ourselves by outsourcing too much thinking to AI, she warned. The risks to human autonomy “could affect our ability to make informed choices and act on them.”
Marketers are ready to trust your judgement. And you need to be able to trust yourself.