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Home  Top Stories Agencies fail to find regional flavour
Agencies fail to find regional flavour |
Written by AdNation Editor, Monday, 15 March 2010
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 Remember the other story from last year’s Lynx? You might not. It kind of got forgotten after the whole ‘cheating’ thing. It went something like this: Agencies in the Middle East are starting to produce world-class creative. Good, even excellent, work, particularly in print and outdoor. Trouble is, it looks like creative that could’ve come from anywhere in the world. It has no local flavour. It might look fantastic, but is it really regionally relevant?
It would, everyone generally agreed, be fantastic to see more work that represented not a vision of the Middle East that pandered to stereotypes – the crescent moon, the falcons, the horses – but one that really reflected the place in which the work was created. The two campaigns heralded as the vanguard of this movement were Leo Burnett Beirut’s “Khede Kasra” and Leo Burnett Cairo’s “Egyptian Fast Food” campaign for Heinz, both of which won big at last year’s event and both of which could only have come from the Middle East.
Fast forward to this year’s event and – from what we’ve seen so far – there’s actually even less work on display that meets the ‘regional flavour’ brief. There’s some very nice work, for sure, but, once again, that nice work could’ve been created in London, Belgrade, New York, or anywhere else on the planet. And while that’s probably good news for agencies with hopes of winning international awards, and while there’s nothing wrong with creating work that has a universal feel... something's still missing. Considering the amount of support that was evident last year for those proposing that Middle East creatives needed to find a regional voice, it’s something of a disappointment to see that – 12 months down the line – no one has managed to do so.
Of course, we’ve only seen half the shortlists so far. Tomorrow, we’ll have the TV/Cinema category up, traditionally Cairo’s strongest area, so we’re hopeful that there may be more ‘Arabic’ work on show there. Even if there is, though, given that everyone seemed to think the idea was so great, why hasn’t anyone followed through on it? That’s not a rhetorical question. We’d really like to know.
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