The true story of Madhouse

Everything started in 2010 in Hungary with an iPhone 3G. On the websites optimized for mobile (there was only a few of them) were no advertisements. After a couple of months, there were. This is how the story of Madhouse began, and already did 3 mobile campaigns that year. Madhouse was founded by Gabor Brindza. The initial (brand)name of the company was MAD but saying that sounded clumsy.

The first year was adventurous. At that time Bela (Bela was the first colleague as business development leader) and Gabor saw only the positive side of the business. It was obvious at the end of that year when they created the first business plan (in a Mexican restaurant called Iguana, which since then became legendary among the Madhouse team, partly because of that odd year end party and on the other hand as it was called 'the world's best restaurant' by our one and only Eva Szantai). After several strawberry margaritas they decided about one main goal. Every month Madhouse should complete two campaigns. It seemed a perfect plan, not impossible target but nice result if they achieved that. More than 50 campaigns were completed.

In 2013, we organised our first house party, which has since become legendary. At that time we rented a room in a big flat in the heart of Budapest. The idea came up easily. The party went well. There were a bunch of people, Bëlga was the headliner (it wasn't easy to convince them to give a spacial concert). As it was a classical house party indeed, the police arrived as we were too noisy. (one of the policemen was the winner of the first Valo Vilag reality show). The first party was followed by a second one in 2016, and another one the year after that. Finally in 2019 we completed the ‘House party’ project for indefinitely. Okay, once last time again in 2022.

In 2014 the company has been acquired by Smartadnetwork Kft. (owned by Gran Private Equity from the financial side and Adverticum from the technical investor side). Luckily enough the Madhouse brand remained. In the next couple of years Madhouse offices had been founded in Romania, Czechia and Slovakia.

Glorious years have come, there were 20 people around Madhouse and we were growing bigger and bigger.

However at one point, progress stopped. Several things started to go to a very wrong direction, and the result was a major breakdown. As a result, we closed the foreign offices and cut costs where we could. That's how we got through that period.

2019 was a fresh start. Attila Szabó joined this new venture. The whole platform has changed, we've moved away from mobile ads and started dealing with ads on the automated platforms. First we started running programmatic ads, then Snapchat came, finally Pinterest was the platform when we believed that there was a real need for paid social ads. It was a breaking point, but this time in a good way. We stopped working with traditional publishers, instead we explored more and more platforms (like TikTok, Viber, Spotify, Tinder, Waze), and Madhouse became the largest player in this special segment in the Central and Eastern European region.

As Madhouse, we evolved a lot during these years. We're very happy to still be here, and not only to be here, but to continue to be at the forefront of bringing new, innovative advertising solutions, as we were about ten years ago.

And from the website (and design) point of view we also evolved a lot, and now we feel that we have found the form and content that presents us exactly as we are.