Dragons of MENA: The show that puts Activation first
For the first time, Activation Ideas is a Knowledge Partner of an award show.
The show is Dragons of MENA, the new Middle East and North Africa edition of the Dragons of Asia. I’ve been asked plenty of times and have always said no. This site is here to share work, not to sell shows. This time I said yes.
Why? “Below the Line” disciplines and techniques deserve the kind of recognition mainstream advertising doesn’t give them. In an agency, these are the ideas often relegated to a few slides at the end of a presentation, cooked at the last minute. Or the flashy ones for award shows that get one-off attention rather making business impact.
I’ve felt that strongly from the start, when I moved from traditional advertising to the rising world of brand activation. Even now, with most shows running activation and experiential categories, the discipline still isn’t properly understood.
That’s why this site exists. And it’s why I’ll back a show that takes activation seriously.
I’ve entered and judged the original Dragons of Asia for about a decade. The reason I paid attention back then is the same reason I’m getting involved now. Since 2000, this has been the show talking about promotional marketing, activation and experiential as primary disciplines. The mainstream shows took years to catch up. Most of them still treat activation as a sidekick to advertising. The Dragons treat it as the main act. There is no global award show built around the full activation and promotional marketing discipline. This is the closest thing.
The MENA edition extends that thinking into a region with the same problem: strong work that doesn’t get seen on the world stage. Two of the ten categories are built specifically for the region: Nation, City & Place Impact, and Faith, Arabic Culture & Seasonal Communications. The show was built for MENA, not pasted on top of it. Judged equally on strategy, concept, execution and results by an international Jury. Entry is affordable and one submission covers both MENA and the Dragons of Asia.
This isn’t Cannes and isn’t trying to be. The work is judged on whether an idea worked in the real world, not on how it looks on a case film. That’s a different scale, and it’s the right one for this kind of campaign.
If you’re working in MENA, or you have activation ideas that deserve to be seen, worth a look. Deadline is 15 June 2026. Awards in Dubai in September.
