PREVIEWING:
THE DISRUPTION STAGE
MAD//FEST 2026
In partnership with:
8 June 2026
The Disruption Stage at MAD//Fest will spotlight challenger brands at every stage of their journey, from early-stage disruptors to category-defining leaders like Uber, and daring challengers like Pizza Pilgrims. Framed by the festival’s theme, The Human Touch, this stage explores how the most successful challengers don’t just scale fast they build brands rooted in real human needs, emotions, and connections.
It’s a space dedicated to the ambition, creativity, and empathy required to break conventions, earn trust, and reshape industries in ways that truly resonate with and engage people.
Keeping It Human at Scale: Uber's Brand Evolution Story
Uber’s brand evolution highlights how both Uber and Uber Eats have grown beyond their original services to become everyday platforms that simplify daily life.
The session, with Will Hooker, Director of Brand + Campaigns UKI, Uber, explores how the brands balance scale, technology, and local relevance to create more human, customer-centric experiences.
Key takeaway: whether moving people or delivering meals, sustainable growth comes from building trust, convenience, and meaningful connections with customers at every touchpoint.
Dough, Disruption & Defiance: How Pizza Pilgrims Took On the Big Guys
Pizza Pilgrims’ journey demonstrates how challenger brands can compete with industry giants by staying authentic, distinctive, and relentlessly customer-focused. You'll find out how the founders turned a passion project into a national brand through bold storytelling, community building, and a refusal to follow conventional growth playbooks.Disruption comes not from outspending competitors, but from creating a brand people genuinely connect with and champion.
With Thom Elliot, Co-founder, Pizza Pilgrims.
Coco de Mer: Beyond the Red Room: 25 years of designing for pleasure
Coco de Mer didn’t build a retail brand. It built an experience of desire. It moved female pleasure from taboo to culture to craft a brand where sensuality, not sexuality, leads.
For 25 years, it has treated store design, packaging and ritual not as detail but as important as the product. Light, texture, space and unboxing are all engineered to trigger emotion not just purchase.
This is about what happens when experience becomes the main event in luxury, and when a brand evolves from selling pure desire, and starts empowering people to define it for themselves. With Lucy Litwack, Owner + CEO, Coco de Mer.
LEON founder John Vincent meets Rory Sutherland
With John back at the helm at LEON, expect a lively conversation on bringing back the love for this iconic British restaurant brand, the ‘enshitification’ of business, and why chasing money might make you less money (with a symbolic slice of halloumi for an example)
With John Vincent, Co-founder, LEON and Rory Sutherland, President Emeritus, Ogilvy UK.
Data don’t crave Whoppers: Why the best ideas still start in the gut
Data can tell you what people do. It cannot tell you how a new mother feels holding a Whopper at 2am. That gap — between the measurable and the felt — is where the best creative work lives and where Burger King operates. Burger King UK CMO, Katie Evans, and BBH Deputy CSO, Saskia Jones, will talk about instincts, human truths & the human touch, and why protecting them is not only the most important creative decision you can make but will also give you an unfair advantage.
CarWow: Disrupting a £45bn Market
Carwow’s success story shows how customer-first innovation can transform one of the UK’s largest and most traditional industries. How has CarWow challenged the conventional car-buying process by increasing transparency, trust, and convenience for both buyers and dealers.Key takeaway: Meaningful disruption comes from solving real customer frustrations and building products that make complex decisions simpler.
With Ben Carter, Chief Customer, Marketing and Media Officer, Carwow.
BRAND
SPEAKERS INCLUDING:
Permission to Play : How Lego x Jelly use creative play to unlock better thinking
Slight gear change for Day 3. Somewhere between childhood and being in our jobs, we stopped playing. We started editing our ideas before they were finished, following the rules instead of questioning them, and mistaking caution for craft. This hands-on workshop led by Lego's Creative Director Jonathan Wicks, is about getting that instinct back. Through a series of fast, hands-on exercises, we'll show how a playful approach to creative thinking produces better briefs, braver ideas, and work that actually lands.
The Sutherland Lecture
New for 2026, The Sutherland Lecture is a state-of-the-nation view on the marketing/advertising industry. Each year, a selected individual will put the big issues on the table and call for collective industry action on key trends, challenges and opportunities. Of course the first person to deliver The Sutherland Lecture will be Rory, who will reflect on his near 40 year career in adland to appraise the health and direction of marketing in 2026.
In 2027, Rory will choose the next Sutherland Lecture speaker, creating a prestigious annual format that marks Rory's contribution to the industry.
Join Our Mailing List
Speaker updates, ticket giveaways and exciting opportunities - don’t miss a thing and be the first to know about what’s happening at MAD//Fest
