You can spot it a mile away - the double hyphens, the mishmash of words into sentences that don't quite make sense, the internet being awash with daft videos of huge waves ridden by giant octopus destroying New York City - and now 'AI slop' has been revealed as the Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year (narrowly beating Ozempic Face).

So we’re excited to share MAD//Fest London’s 2026 theme, ‘The Human Touch’.

At MAD//Fest London on 7-9 July, we’ll bring together the best humans in the business to reclaim what sets us apart, and explore how to leverage the best tech and innovation to gain a marketing edge, rather than serve up generic slop.

This isn’t about man vs machine. Clearly ‘augmented creativity’ has a huge role to play in the future of advertising and the research from both Kantar and System1 says AI ads can be more effective at sparking emotion than traditionally produced content (Kantar Marketplace will once again sponsor MAD//Fest’s Hexagon Stage in 2026). And although the jury is out on Coke’s AI generated Christmas ad, from analysing data to driving personalisation and agentic AI, marketers are finding ingenious ways of using tech and innovation to do what we need to do faster, better, cheaper. 

But we do think it’s time to bring humanity back into the marketing conversation, discuss how it drives competitive advantage, and explore models that combine the best of human creativity with AI.

“Words like ‘AI’, ‘agentic’ and ‘generative’ are being thrown around with reckless abandon, leaving many of us lost, confused and, let’s be honest, a bit bored,” said Dan Brain, MAD//Fest London’s Co-founder. 

“We’ve had a huge reaction to this theme already and it seems to have captured the mood music as brands, agencies and tech innovators make their moves for 2026,” said Dan Brain, MAD//Fest London’s Co-founder.

“There’s renewed interest in the human touch, how it differentiates brands, drives truly original ideas, and the role of people in the future of our industry.  I think most pragmatic people would say that human creativity and AI are both going to be around for the long haul, so we’re using MAD//Fest London 2026 to ask the really big questions. We’re excited to bring together the world's top brand builders and tech innovators to cement our thinking about how this uneasy relationship is going to work,” he added.

Click HERE to submit your interest in speaking opportunities at MAD//Fest London.