Another Dubai Lynx comes to an end and for me it was a thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring experience. Over the last couple of years, one has been witnessing a gradual shift in the tectonic plates of communications industry. From being a festival purely celebrating creative excellence, where the creative gurus ruled, Lynx has seen increasing participation and even dominance from technology and media companies and practitioners. This blurring of lines really does mirror the audience behavior as they seamlessly move between their physical and virtual worlds across devices and create and consume content where they want when they want. This has given rise to equal importance in the whole process to idea creators, channel planners and technology platforms.
The award entries bring to fore this rising trends where the entries from creative agencies jostled for space with media agencies and digital agencies in the same categories. And, what was really proud for the MENA communication business was that the showcased work would be right in the top bracket of Global benchmarks. If my agency, MEC were to be taken as a representative sample, the work done on Nescafe Arabiana emerged as top amongst all EMEA in the MEC Global ideas, which just goes on to demonstrate that Middle East creativity has truly come of age.
The shortlisted and winning work demonstrated another important facet of the way we work in new world order. While the lead agency for the award entry could have been either a creative, media or a digital agency, they could undoubtedly not have done it alone. The contribution of other agency partners would have been paramount in the success of the campaign. The mantra for success, therefore is ‘collaboration’. The blurred lines of communication has put this important noun as the key ingredient. Truly successful campaigns have been ones where the partners who have collaborated the best with each partner bringing an important dimension to the table.
‘Content is the King’ was the dominant theme throughout the festival and the speakers were driving this point home in various forms and manner. I would like to refine this maxim thus ‘Content is the King, and distribution is the queen’. One cannot live without the other and in fact, the queen calls the shots. This really does demonstrate the importance of collaboration. The content idea itself does not guarantee success, it needs a strong distribution to carry it. The rockstar of Lynx, Shingy, aptly summed up his session with the following words – “technology, content and distribution are three colors with which you can paint any canvas”. Here’s to more integration between the three.
