MAD//Fest.

Building a digital platform for the UK’s biggest, boldest + most distinctive marketing/advertising festival.

Back in 2018, Anything was instrumental in getting MAD//Fest off the ground by developing its first website for the debut event, which drew 2,000 attendees.

Fast forward to 2024, and MAD//Fest has evolved into a major, dynamic festival of marketing, advertising, and disruptive creativity, now attracting over 14,000 attendees and some of the brightest minds in the industry. MAD//Fest had ambitious plans to expand its portfolio of events and needed a new digital platform to support its continued growth.

Challenge

The current website was built using Prismic with a PHP framework. While it functioned well, they still relied on Anything to manage tasks like updating navigation, adding new sections, and launching new events. What they really needed was a platform that would give them full control.

MAD//Fest had evolved into more than just a single event. With the launch of the Female Leaders Club, MAD//Masters, and a North-focused event in the works, they needed a platform capable of effortlessly supporting multiple events, with the flexibility to accommodate even more in the future.
While Prismic was excellent for managing content like Insights and News, it wasn't as effective for handling sections and adding entire new events.
The PHP framework was beginning to show its age, particularly in terms of meeting Core Web Vitals standards.

MAD//Fest found themselves juggling the same content across multiple platforms, including a mobile app that was specifically used during the event.
As the sheer scale of the events expanded, managing speakers, attendees, and everything else demanded significant manpower. What MAD//Fest needed was a platform that could also support the development of a portal, enabling people to update their own information independently.

Solution

Anything meticulously planned, designed and implemented a new digital platform that could seamlessly manage all market websites from a single CMS solution.

A future-proof digital experience:

The solution was centered around the Headless CMS, Storyblok. We chose Storyblok for its best in class content management capabilities, enabling the MAD//Fest team to easily manage every aspect of the website, from navigation to adding completely new event properties.
Dedicated servers are a thing of the past, thanks to our use of a Netlify Serverless solution. This approach automatically distributes the website's code across the globe, eliminating the need for a single, centralized location. As a result, the website delivers lightning-fast performance no matter where you access it from, while also ensuring maximum resilience with no single point of failure.

The website is powered by the performance focused framework Astro. Unlike JavaScript heavy frameworks like React or Next.js, Astro takes a unique approach by only serving JavaScript when needed. This ensures minimal page weight and industry-leading Core Web Vitals performance.
The new technology stack paves the way for the development of a self-service portal. This portal will not only offer a more responsive and improved service for speakers and sponsors but also lead to significant cost savings by reducing the need for manpower.

Sustainability

In addition to delivering a robust, scalable solution to meet MAD//fest ambitious growth targets, we were committed to building a website with sustainability at its core. To align with this ethos, we transitioned from always-on dedicated servers to a serverless approach, significantly reducing the website's carbon footprint.

Good

Core Web Vitals

100%

Lighthouse SEO Score

97%

Lighthouse Accessibility Score

Storyblok has been a gamechanger for us in terms of how we manage content for multiple websites. Our new sites look fantastic and the CMS gives us the flexibility we need as a b2b media business dealing with large volumes of content. We're excited to explore future design possibilities with our agency, Anything, and I'd recommend Storyblok to any business.

Dan Brain
Co-founder of MAD//Fest

We believe our customers deserve the right solutions without compromise.

We delivered a high-performance, resilient, and scalable digital solution for MAD//Fest, setting them on a path to sustained digital growth. By collaborating relentlessly with our customers and simplifying the complex, we get results together.

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MAD//Fest.

Challenge

Solution

Sustainability

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