Creat_ve _ndustry Summ_t #1

My first time to attend the Creative Industry Summit today was really successful! An event that is full of fellow marketers working on the corporate side or the agency side to share the ideas & insights interchangeably. From the successful campaigns discussed, I have really enjoyed Juhayna with Bahya, Vodafone Shabra2a, DHL with Mohamed Salah, She is my Tribe partnership between The Daily Crisp & StarDust.

I am really interested to become an I-Read ambassador as a reader who reads a bunch of books annually. A new initiative that I got introduced to because of the event today. I have also get introduced to the Creative Shop by Facebook & Instagram, that I am really interested to try. Scroll down for more details.

With the energetic TV presenter Passant El Husseiny adding good vibes to the full day. In addition to meeting amazing souls like Coucla Refaat & Ola Roushdy on the go.

What is the Creative Industry Summit?

Creative Industry Summit aims to serve as the creatives hub for MENA region. Gathering the creative industry to network and share insights in a collaborative manner. Usually they meet twice a year, one is the main event & the other is Ramadan's edition. On the 26th & 27th of March they are having their 10th edition of their unique main event.

What is new this time?

In the 10th edition the Creative Industry Summit is different, usually they had one track only which is Advertising, Media, and Marketing. However, this edition they have decided to add two more parallel tracks one is eCommerce & Technology, the other is Food Innovation.

Tell us more about each track.

Advertising, Media, and Marketing: fight conformity with creativity, through exploring ideas and how they are deployed in action. This is an opportunity to hear the stories behind the award-winning ideas and campaigns.

eCommerce & Technology: this track is all about tech-enabled creativity through talks about the latest trends such as machine learning, one-click purchase, automation, voice search, and more.

Food Innovation: bringing together the professionals and foodies to explore the innovative future of the food industry. Discussing the global flavors, taste, nutrition, trends, and lifestyles.

Who are the sponsors?

Owned & Organize: The Worx

Media Sponsors: Cairo Central, Cairo West, Cairo East, Daily News, El Qahera Wl Nas, The Daily Crisp.

Sponsors: Tyarah, ArabAd, ACME, Bravo, Scoop Empire, Identity, Roofwrite, StarDust, Think Marketing.

Ride Partner: Uber

Platinum Sponsors: Nestle, Bdaya the creative city, Palm Hills Development

Advertising Agency: FP7/CAI

Social Media Partner: Icon

Payment Partner: YallaPay

PR Partner: Weber Shandwick

What are the key take-outs from Day#1?

I have attended the Advertising, Media, and Marketing track; and this is the first day takeouts.

#1 John Salley-NBA Champion & Hollywood star from USA:

• Focus on your work & pursuit your passion then the money will come.

• What you gain is what you give.

• Repeating the same thing with no creativity is a real mistake.

#2 Chaker Khazal-Author, Reporter & Speaker from Canada:

• Born in 1987 & raised in a refugees camp in Lebanon, now he is a Palestinian Canadian award-winning writer & Public speaker.

• Believing in storytelling as the key to touch people lives.

• Any fiction is based on reality.

• UN creates creative ways to live a humane life, to help refugees survive.

• His book "Tales of Tala" is a best seller, that you have to read.

#3 Weera Saad-Regional Head for the Creative Shop MEA & Turkey:

• You need to blur your mind & light it. Learn your lines because it is always not anyones fault except you. This is the advice that Weera has learned during her early professional years in Tarek Nour's agency.

• She believes that we all should become global citizens.

• Facebook & Instagram Creative Shop helps agencies through creating better stories for their ads.

• The pace of creating content nowadays is surpassing our consumption pace.

• Currently, 5GB of content are produced in 10 minutes.

• Our brains has internal filters to be capable to process the content created.

• The currency for storytellers is "attention".

• There is no recipe for creativity.

• For every ad you have to focus on: branding (mention your brand during the first 3 seconds, otherwise people will scroll & skip), sound (make it silent if people are going to view it on their mobiles), framing (consider the frame & specs of the ad), and time (make it quick, 2-3 seconds are enough).

• The key is to create a full story, regardless of the formats.

• The most important thing is to keep people first or stay client centric.

• There is a certain behavior for mobile-users that we should consider: on-the-go scrolling for short & quick content, lean-forward while commuting for engagement, lead-back while relaxing for engagement & entertainment.

• For a successful campaign, you need to create an ecosystem. The strategy can be: immediate Pitch for the care phase, interactive Play for the consider phase, dive-in Plunge for the cash phase.

• You should show up where the target audience are.

• Messenger Chatbots can be used to close big deals, Renault has sold cars through the chatbot.

• Make sure that your stories are native to the environment it is told in & relevant to the people with a punch of creativity. The results will be magical.

#4 Panel with Mohamed El Bassiouni the co-founder & managing director of Tayarah as the moderator & Heba Abd El Monsef the marketing director of Palm Hills Development, Mostafa Talaat the senior marketing communications manager in Vodafone, Nour Ahmadein the business development manager in Uber MENA, Passant Fouad the associate director for external communication in Juhayna.

• KPIs are translating objectives to numerical targets, it can be raising awareness or engagement or lead generation. Bearing in mind the targeting & the product life-cycle. KPIs are planned because you can never manage what you can't measure.

• Planning always comes first before creating the content, as we should have a strategy for every channel. Then, we may plan with the messaging curated to the different targeted segments showing their real-life & designed locally for a specific format.

• The best combination for a corporate or client is to have an agency for the full-time jobs & corporates may cooperate with other agencies for ad-hoc projects.

• On digital there is always a chance for A/B testing & understanding the customer behavior on each platform. In addition to this, you also have the social-listening capability to check the positive or the negative sentiments & act accordingly.

• Integrating Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR to the marketing plan is a must to gain the socially responsible consumers.

#5 Panel with Mai Abaza the managing director of Publicist as the moderator & Fayrouz Nasser the founder & CEO of Daily Crisp, Lamia Kamel the managing director of CC Plus & founder of Narrative Summit, Meryl El Afifi the executive creative director of Momentum, Nesma El Shazly the executive producer & founder of StarDust, Weera Saad the regional head of Creative Shop.

• We are living in a male-dominated world! A survey was done on women in their 40s or 60s where they believed that the career comes first for males only & females are the care-givers in the house even if this may cause them to lose their jobs.

• We should start having more women in leadership positions to start enhancing our economies.

• Corporates should start helping females to co-create in the ecosystem through providing working-from-home or day-care service for the newborns or an agreement to come back from maternity to a good position or give big projects to pregnant women without the maternity-phobia.

• We should all aim to human empowerment instead of women empowerment, as we should focus on the humanity with no differentiation.

• For any person to succeed, they need to have a support system.

#6 Panel with Passant El Husseiny the TV presenter as the moderator & Ahmed Mourad the novelist, Ingy El Sabban the CEO & BOD member of Victory Link, Sherine Rashed the general manager of Evolution

• I-Read is an ethical & strategic project, encouraging youth to read & having this as a CSR project for the corporates.

• I-Read is emphasizing on booking some time daily to reading a book through celebrity endorsements.

• A study has shown that Arab countries read for 6 minutes annually vs. European countries read for 20 hours annually. In comparison to Social Media usage which is 3 hours daily for Arabic countries vs. 20 minutes daily for European countries.

#7 Salma Hamouda-Executive Director of NewsLab (for Social Media) in JWT Cairo

• We do scroll through 92 meters of content on Social Media, so for DHL campaign featuring Mohamed Salah they have decided to change the strategy from Pushing the message to Creating a Movement to Leading by Humanity to Making the Headlines.

• Instead of pushing the DHL connecting people message in a traditional way. They have decided to create a movement through connecting the real fans with Mohamed Salah & lead by humanity through sharing some genuine gifts from Salah to his fans as well. All of this led to making the headlines in every piece of news. Because of a new & creative idea that they led for Mohamed Salah to deactivate all of his social accounts.

#8 Panel with Sabrina Khalil the chief content officer of Scoop Empire as the moderator, Sherry El Kilany the managing partner of Scoop Empire & Abe Shady Abo El Naga the general manager of VuClip, Ahmed Abbas the founder & CEO of DigSys, Mohamed Mounir Mursi the general manager of Iflix

• Everything around us revolves around content that makes people use their minds & think.

• We should all watch the consumption habits before creating content.

Stay tuned for day #2 ...