Creative industry summit: developing a vision for upcoming challenges

• Published date: 07 September 2016
• Publication title: Daily News Egypt

Aiming to discuss creativity in advertising, drama, and digital marketing campaigns during the month of Ramadan, the creative industry summit launched its annual special event on 5 September. The summit aims to bring together large numbers of professionals in the business and creative industries in Egypt by targeting six key areas, including advertising, art and design, film, radio and television, photography, business innovation, and music. The Ramadan edition opened the door for discussing creative ideas in advertising, drama, and e-marketing campaigns, and shed light on current challenges.

The event started with some quick sessions that gave an overview on advertisement spending during Ramadan and the importance of utilising Egyptian monuments for promoting certain brands. The first panel discussion included a large number of professionals who represented seven of the largest working companies in different sectors in Egypt, including Mindshare Cairo, PAM media services, Orange Egypt, P and G Mena, Animation advertising, Paramount Media, and Core Republic. The panelists discussed the importance of Ramadan for the marketing fields and focused on the wide range of competitors they have to take into consideration.

The session that followed paid special attention to the creative awareness campaigns that were held by non-governmental institutions last Ramadan. Heba El-Swedy, the founder of Ahl Masr foundation, the first non-profit charity specialised in treating burn injuries, was interviewed in a session entitled 'Creativity in Social Corporate Responsibility'. She explained how she wanted to think outside the box on ways to grab people's attention about the large number of burn victims and how to treat the patients afterwards.

'We found out that about 100,000 cases of burn injuries take place [every year] and only 40% of them are able to survive. Unfortunately, the hospitals refuse to host such patients and that's why we thought about establishing the first non-profit specialised hospital for treating burns in the MENA region,' El Swedy said.

To help bridge the gap between the burn patients and the public and encourage people to accept them and integrate them into society, El Swedy decided to think of an innovative advertising strategy.

'We launched a campaign on the internet called 'See it with your heart' that included a song in which we encouraged people not to avoid looking at the patients' faces. In this song, we used colours as a...