Dubai: Representatives of advertising agencies in the Middle East came together this week for the Dubai Lynx 2010, Dubai's international advertising festival.
The festival, which exhibits and awards creative advertising work in the region, also held discussions on how the industry is evolving today and the challenges it faces.
"We're at the crossroads when it comes to the way we do advertising," said Ahmad Al Azizi, Vice-President of Marketing, PepsiCo Middle East and Africa, during a seminar at The Palladium in Dubai Media City Monday.
Al Azizi said that creative agencies need to focus on original ideas regardless of the medium in which they will be transformed, whether print, television or digital.
Raja Trad, Chief Executive Officer for Leo Burnett Group in the Mediterranean region, calls the process of going back to the drawing board "neutral planning." He said that the advertising agency should move away from catering to one medium or another, but rather work on the objective of the advertisement.
"I think that the transformation is taking place right now, but the industry is a little bit late. The people are ahead of us. They don't want to talk to us through a print ad or just a 30-second commercial but through social media," he said.
Malek Ghorayeb, Executive Regional Creative Director at Leo Burnett, said the advertising agencies have lost their passion for playing the game. "We're facing an old process we need to break," he said.
He expressed his concern about the lack of equilibrium between the creative agencies on one side and those who make business decisions on the other.
"We've become businessmen and not dreamers anymore. In an industry that is very much money driven, we're afraid of losing a client, we're afraid of challenging a client, we're afraid of pushing a client because of the money problem," he said.
"You have to create campaigns that are connected to the fabric of the society. We need to go deep into the human insights of the people," Trad added.
"At the end of the day, we're strong believers that creativity is what can transform human behaviour. It's a reflection of what we really are and not what we artificially are, then we score." But despite the challenges, Ghorayeb said that the industry in the Middle East is on the right track. We're a little late but we have all the talent to catch up, he said.
