Bechara Mouzannar chief creative officer, Leo Burnett MENA

“In just eight years the Dubai Lynx was able to create its own mythology, inviting inspiring speakers and hot topics to the stage, contributing to the education of the younger generations (and hopefully of the elder ones), composing highly respectable juries and setting an evolving benchmark for creative excellence in communication in our region.

The only prediction I can make about the Lynx every year is that it will improve on all fronts versus the year before. And year-on-year, everything has been improving in numbers: the delegates, the entries, the conferences on stage, the jurors, the awards and even the scams, whereas the quality has improved on everything except the scams.

Those [scams] were born to be gold but ended up being bronze, rarely silver, or remained solely on the shortlists. There were ‘glorious’ times when scams used to celebrate ideas that were too difficult to sell to a client. Today scams have become a cheap, yet expensive, way to bias the results of the whole competition. Whether they are unveiled in print, in print craft or in outdoor, the scams always look neat in their art direction, often undecided in their idea, and most of the time hilarious in their relevance to the brands’ needs in the market place. Where they do stand, they are aesthetics without ethics.

In terms of results, Leo Burnett had a good year, not the best year. We got a bigger tally (37) than last year, as well as eight golds, with a good synergy between our teams in Dubai and Beirut. We were also awarded for our regular work on brands and clients like du, Samsung, McDonald’s, P&G, Mobinil, Virgin Radio and LibanPost.

Yet our performance was outnumbered by Memac Ogilvy, whose success was expected and well-deserved. They had several good, well-crafted campaigns in the same year and they had not participated at the Cristals, concentrating their strategy, their energy and their budget into winning both crowns at the Lynx.”