A massive marketing festival is coming to the North for the first time – and its founders say they chose to bring it to Manchester after a throwaway comment from Gary Neville that showed just how creative the city is.
MAD//Fest has been held in London since 2018 and attracts 12,000 people to hear speakers from the world’s biggest brands talk about advertising and marketing.
Now, , MAD//UpNorth will be coming to Aviva Studios in February after organisers Ian Houghton and Dan Brain realised they needed to celebrate the thriving creative businesses in Manchester and the North of England. But they say this won’t be a “regional show” – they want it to become a global event that just happens to be in the North.
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Dan said: “Nobody would think twice if there was a US marketing event based in Chicago or L.A. or Miami. Why not have a flagship international marketing event that is based outside of London?
"What we're trying to do isn't a regional show. We're going to be giving a platform for businesses based across the north to talk, to share their work. But the vision really is to create something that can hold its own amongst the elite of international events.”
Ian said: “London has 12,000 people that come over the three days. And for MAD//UpNorth, we are projecting 4,000-plus delegates for year one. That will be the biggest marketing and advertising event that has ever happened for the north. From day one.
“And we can see MAD//UpNorth becoming as big as, if not bigger than, London over the course of the coming two or three years. That’s a very significant, wonderful opportunity to create something that's genuinely inspiring for everybody who comes.”
Speakers are set to include John Roberts, founder and CEO at Bolton electrical giant AO World, as well as writer and “advertising legend” Rory Sutherland, and Irn-Bru’s marketing director Lucy Henderson.
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Dan said: “We really want to program this in a way where we are showcasing the best of local, but also trying to bring an international flavour as well.”
Ian said the inspiration for the event was “a throwaway comment by Gary Neville when he spoke at MAD//FEST London in 2023” about his business career. He said: “Gary was being shown around the event by a very avid Manchester United fan on our team afterwards, and he said ‘this would be amazing in Manchester’.
“Then we thought maybe we should speak to some people in Manchester in Leeds and Liverpool and and just see whether there was an appetite. And the appetite was enormous right from the word go.
“We looked at the number of Northern brands, the incredible volumes of northern agencies, the very collaborative and friendly style of working together. And we thought ‘MAD//FEST is quite a collaborative, fun event, and this could work really well. And as soon as we pressed go and said 'Let's talk about it seriously', people started to follow us and get involved and sponsor it straight away.
“There just seemed like a real appetite in the north for something that really champions everything that's going on in all the different northern cities.”
Dan and Ian’s goal for their events is ambitious – to “give a window into the minds of some of the greatest practitioners and thinkers in the industry”. But these events are meant to be fun as well as practical.
Dan said: “MAD//FEST is not your average buttoned-down formal-style trade show or conference. We do lots of brand partnerships. We make it really fun. We have music, we have DJs, we have entertainment. It's really colourful. It's in your face. It is vibrant. We're just really looking forward to taking the best of what we know to Manchester, adding a little bit of local flavour, and hopefully coming up with something magical.”
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And Ian added: "If MAD//FEST was a city. It would be a bit like Manchester."
The MAD//UpNorth team have spent time at the Manchester campus of advertising giant WPP, which opened last year on part of the old Granada Studios site. That’s given Dan and Ian a close-up view of the many dramatic changes going on in that part of the city centre, which is also home to companies such as tech giant Booking.com and games giant Cloud Imperium.
Dan said: “It's a really youthful, interesting, dynamic, creative kind of place. And that really, really suits the MAD//FEST brand.
“Then you can look at the specialisms of the different cities across the north – Manchester may have things like fashion, Liverpool and have Yorkshire retail, Leeds has financial services. You start adding all of that together and there's a really interesting market… that deserves its own flagship event.”
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