News & Insights
Geeta M
Copywriter
The Tanween Festival in Ithra, Dammam is the largest platform in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which celebrates the creative process in advertising. Tanween is dedicated to connecting change-makers and innovators to nurture and inspire creativity in an ever-changing world.
This year, Crowd Dubai’s Head of Design, Kuba Skowronski was invited to the Tanween festival to co-host “A Day With Ramsey Naja’, a design workshop alongside the legendary Ramsey Naja- the CCO of JWT and one of the top creatives in Tribal DDB in the region.
Ithra, where the Tanween festival is held every year is an innovation and technology hub built as an homage to where oil was first discovered, catapulting KSA into the international realm of things. Interestingly, the building was designed by a renowned Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, and his firm Snøhetta. It is clad in pipes of a total length equal to the distance from Dammam to Riyadh - the capital of KSA.
The assignments were designed to test the creative advertising thinking of 15 people, divided into 3 teams. Each team was to work on one major brief for the Saudi Ministry of Health and 2 smaller briefs focused on popular brands. These hypothetical briefs were created to test the teams’ creative thinking and capability to tailor ideas according to specific advertising mediums.
“During the competition, Ramsey, our Saudi co-host Haya, and I were tripping the teams up with all sorts of random events such as detainment for some funny made-up reason, f power or internet outages to subjecting one of the team members to a simulated dental surgery that left him with the anesthetic preventing him from talking for a short period and to simulate that, we had him wear a mouthguard. Fun stuff!” said Kuba, talking about his experience while conducting the workshop.
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