How Nine Branded Event Series Kept a 30-Year Institution Relevant
Brand strategy, audience development, and creative direction — self-initiated, sustained for 15 years.
The Audience Was Aging Out
Mad Planet has been a Milwaukee institution for over 30 years — consistently voted the city's best nightclub by the Shepherd Express. It built its reputation on Friday night Retro: 80s new wave, synth pop, a little 70s funk.
By the time my DJ partner and I took up residency, the owner was exhausted, competition had multiplied across the city, and the club was quietly bleeding. She had considered selling. A competing DJ crew had tried to buy it and failed to secure funding.
Nobody had formally asked me to fix anything. I just saw what was happening and knew I could help.
The Diagnosis
As DJs, reading a room is the job. What I saw at Mad Planet was simple and brutal: the 80s nostalgia crowd was now in their 50s. The few who still showed up went home before midnight. The core audience that built this place had aged out of nightlife — and nobody had built a replacement audience yet.
The crowd wasn't shrinking because of bad management or bad music. It was shrinking because the club had stopped evolving while its audience kept getting older.
The Strategy
Rather than modernizing the existing Retro night — which would have alienated the remaining loyal base — I proposed expanding the calendar with entirely new branded event series, each targeting a distinct demographic with its own identity, aesthetic, and social presence. The insight: nostalgia is always available. The 80s crowd aged out, but the 90s crowd was right behind them, and the early 2000s crowd behind that. Each generation has a musical era they'd pay to relive. The job was to build those rooms before the moment passed.
"The owner kept the club instead of selling. It remains independently owned and operating. We're still there."
— Mike Shank
The Quiet Rebrand Nobody Asked For
Alongside the event series, I rebuilt Mad Planet's institutional brand entirely — uninstructed. The club had no real visual identity. Their logo was a xeroxed photograph of a sign someone painted on the wall in the 1970s.
Working informally, drawing from the club's own extraordinary interior of retro sci-fi horror murals and art, I developed a consistent visual and verbal identity for the institution. I introduced motion into their social presence, creating animations and video content built from the club's own artwork — giving a 30-year-old venue a contemporary digital voice without stripping away what made it feel like Mad Planet.
For every branded night I personally developed the full identity: name, logo, color palette, typography, voice, poster design, and social presence.
Taking the Club Online
When Milwaukee clubs shut down during COVID lockdowns, I pitched and produced Mad Planet Online — a live Twitch streaming series that kept the resident DJ roster performing on their regular schedules, broadcasting from home. I built the Twitch channel infrastructure, designed all on-screen graphics for each DJ's stream based on the club's interior aesthetic, and produced all marketing materials for the series.