Thea Skelton, Festival Director of Dubai Lynx, speaks to Destination about the upcoming Dubai Lynx event.
What happens at Dubai Lynx?
Dubai Lynx is the leading celebration of creativity in the MENA region. As a sister festival to Cannes Lions, Dubai Lynx brings the MENA creative communications community together to honour creative excellence through Awards.
The 13th edition of the Festival kicks off on the evening of Sunday, March 10 with a party, followed by two days of unmissable content from a range of regional and international speakers from across the creative ecosystem. Running alongside the main stages seminars are young talent competitions, industry hacks, workshops, community meet-ups, and c-suite roundtable series.
The main theme of this year’s Festival is “Creativity Transforms” and this runs throughout our content programme and all networking opportunities, provoking conversation around a rapidly changing world of creative communications.
What are the highlights of the 2019 edition?
We’ve introduced a new Award, Glass: The Lynx for Change. Winning work in this category will celebrate culture-shifting creativity through ideas that are intended to change the world. There is compelling evidence that gender diversity is becoming business-critical and we’ve seen many brands in the MENA region producing campaigns that break stereotypes.
Just as the industry is evolving and has to continuously innovate, so too does the Festival, and we need to make changes the industry wants. In 2019, the Festival will be a highly-focused two-day event and includes more opportunities for networking and fostering business connections. We’ve got some of the world’s biggest and boldest brands coming to the Festival with speakers from Amazon, Snapchat, Euronews, Emirates Airlines, Mayar Foods, and General Motors taking to Dubai Lynx stages.
Can you tell us more about what will be covered?
The content program is dedicated to exploring all forms of transformation across the MENA region. There are six distinct themes that drill into the issue, and the sessions offer solutions and unearth new questions for us as an industry to confront.
- Proving creative effectiveness
- Understanding the changes sweeping our industry and exploring new agency models
- Curating connected brand experiences – online and offline
- Embracing equality and diversity
- Discovering opportunities in Saudi Arabia
- Driving Digital and technological transformation
Some of this year’s speakers include Rob Reilly, Global Creative Chairman of McCann Worldgroup, Caitlin Ryan, Regional Creative Director, EMEA for Facebook and Instagram, Ogilvy’s Worldwide CCO Piyush Pandey and Head of Digital at FP7/Riyadh Tala Alem.
Location: Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai
Web: dubailynx.com
Instagram: dubailynx
