Yet another Dubai Lynx draws to an end, this year however the festival was bigger than ever, more people, more work, more speakers and certainly more energy, and I’m certainly glad to be among the 1,700 delegates who attended Dubai Lynx this year, no matter what you’ll read or hear, nothing compares to being physically present at the festival.
Being a big fan of the festival I had to highlight some of the best aspects of the festival, here we go:
Whenever you want to highlight best the best bits of an event, you go back to the beginning, but this time I’m going to start from the very end, the festival concluded with a brilliant presentation by Rory Sutherland, the Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather UK, this is seminar is undoubtedly the best seminar this year, and one of the very best presentation that I personally seen, and I’m glad that Mr. sutherland decided to take nearly an hour to deliver his presentation, frankly I wouldn’t mind another hour of his talks! YouTube him, you will find many great speeches by him, you can also check his reading list.
The Media Monks presented what is thought to be the first “Second Screen” presentation ever in the UAE, it was a cool idea to get the audience involved in a presentation, as well as getting connected and tweeted by the audience.
Another seminar that I enjoyed is the Freedom Theater, an inspiring story from Palestine, showcasing how art and culture being used as tools of resistance against brutality of Israel. Hats off to Jonatan Stanczak and Mustafa Steti, and whoever is supporting this initiative in any way!
One of the biggest highlights of the year is the #CrowdStorming initiative by Leo Burnett, the walls of of the Lynx Academy were transformed into a live canvas where inspiration came from twitter. The idea was to engage the creative community through a hashtag, anyone could inspire the artists through words or images or ideas using the #CrowdStorming. Such a brilliant idea!
Getty Images presented a cool video wall at the festival, when you stand in front of this wall and start controlling the flow of the keywords on the screen, you’ll definitely feel that you are transformed into the Minority Report movie!
I really enjoyed the Dubai Lynx this year, some of the speakers were really brilliant and certainly delivered great seminars, and for now, I’m really looking for the awards tonight!
