MAD//Fest 2026: The week the industry talked about trust

MAD//Fest returned this week, and if there was one thread running through almost every session, it was trust. How brands build it, how platforms erode it and how AI is complicating both. Fittingly, Propeller spent the week doing exactly what several speakers said matters most: showing up in person.

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Empower at MAD//Fest

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Empower had a proper presence on the ground. The Empower Podcast recorded live from the Female Leaders' Club, our associate director Hilary Gray ran a networking session on Wednesday 9th July, and we were delighted to welcome Emma Harris, whose "Slow the F*ck Down" message has struck a real chord across the industry this year, for an on-stage conversation.
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Beyond the four walls of Empower, the wider Propeller team was out in force. Not only did we have clients speaking across the programme. On Tuesday, we were at the Alliance of Independent Agencies Awards, where Empower is shortlisted for Best Purpose Driven Campaign.

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Trust was the story of the week

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Cvent's Felicia Asiedu opened Day 1 with a warning: brands think they're building trust and audiences aren't buying it. 96% of the brands she spoke to believe they're building trust, and over 90% think that trust has grown in the last 12 months. That's not a reading the industry can back up. 
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Her point was a simple one. Online is how we live, but it's not how we build trust. As she put it, you can't catfish someone over coffee. Marketers already sense this: 81% told her they're turning to events to build trust, and 72% say events are already their most effective channel.
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Louis Theroux picked up a related idea from a different angle. He's spent his career following subcultures that used to sit at the fringes and are now mainstream, partly because algorithms reward the extreme. His view was that legacy media still has a role to play in fact-checking and editorial accountability, even as trust shifts toward streamers and independent voices. He argued for more transparency from the people who control what we see online, particularly for younger audiences, and for all of us to be more deliberate about our information diet.
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That same tension between algorithms and authenticity ran through Snap's sessions. Georgia Kelly's team made the case for long-term creator relationships over one-off activations, quoting creator Jim Chapman's line that one piece of content is a raindrop in a thunderstorm online. Consistency, not virality, was the recurring advice. Later, Snap's Kate Mellett argued that most AI in the industry is optimised for the wrong thing, flooding feeds for attention rather than building anything people actually want. Her suggestion was to build for friendships, not feeds, and to use AI to make moments feel more personal rather than more automated.
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Charlotte Tilbury's session offered a practical version of the same idea: resist chasing trends. Instead, the focus should be on building a personality distinctive enough that people recognise it instantly. Consistency compounds over time in a way trends never do.
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The AI theme continued with Dr Julia Shaw, who set out three risks marketers should watch for when using AI: de-skilling, mis-skilling, and never-skilling, where the tool quietly does the thinking for you. Her advice was to stay skilled in doing things without AI, to interrogate its output rather than accept it and to be transparent when something is AI generated.
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The sharpest debate of the week came in "Molly vs the Machines," where panellists disagreed on whether banning under-16s from social media actually solves anything. CAN's Jake Dubbins argued the real issue is platform design and business models, not content, and that self-regulation has failed. 
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Virgin Media O2's Johnny Winn countered that a ban risks becoming a symbolic move that quietly lets platforms off the hook. Where the panel agreed was on the role of advertisers: with real spend attached, brands have leverage platforms can't ignore, with several speakers encouraging the room to start asking harder questions about exactly what their media spend is funding.
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Elsewhere, Kyle Anthony Fiore and Mark Lester's "Tech Identity Crisis" session made the case that as tech giants expand into every category at once, brand clarity becomes the differentiator. Their conclusion: categories are dead, know your values and clarity beats clever every time.
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The takeaway
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Three days of programming kept returning to the same idea from different directions: trust isn't something you can claim, it's something you build in the open, consistently, and often in person. It's a fitting backdrop for a week where Empower did exactly that, on stage, in the room and in conversation.

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