Saudi work is winning on the Croisette, Saudi judges are sitting on its juries, and the industry’s defining brand has booked three days in KAFD. Riyadh is not hosting the creative world. It is briefing it.
In June, on the first day of Cannes Lions 2026, the first Silver Lion awarded to this region went to Saudia for “Let It Fly,” made by Publicis KSA in Jeddah with Saatchi & Saatchi Middle East. The same day, IKEA AlSulaiman took a Bronze in Print for “Affordable Masterpieces.” On the Health and Wellness jury that year sat Muhannad Abdullah Kadi, Chief Marketing Officer of King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre. Saudi Arabia was not in the audience on the Riviera. It was on the stage and on the bench.
That is the context the rest of the world sometimes misses. Creativity is not arriving in Saudi Arabia. It is being produced here, at volume, under the most demanding brief any market has written for itself, and it is being judged by the industry’s own standard and found good. The work is the reason the industry is moving. Everything that follows in this column rests on that fact.
For more than seventy years, the creative industry has measured itself by one week on the French Riviera. In September, the company that owns that week announced where its next room would be built: King Abdullah Financial District, Riyadh, December 6 to 8, 2027.
The decision is made. The dates are fixed. The partners are named: Tahaluf, the Ministry of Media, LIONS. What remains is the only question that has ever mattered about a creative festival, and the one I spend my working life on. What will be said in that room, and will the world need to hear it?
My answer is yes. The reasons are not sentimental. They are structural.
Riyadh keeps a long diary, and it is full. Cityscape Global opens at Malham on November 16, with Black Hat MEA scheduled for December. Next year brings the Future Investment Initiative’s tenth edition, Riyadh Fashion Week and the Global Health Exhibition to the city, each with its partners and registrations in place. And in December 2027, LIONS Riyadh opens at KAFD. Read as a whole, that is a capital planning two years ahead and filling every season.
LIONS Riyadh is fourteen months out. That is the right horizon for a festival of this kind: long enough to build a program worth travelling for, with the whole of next year’s calendar ahead of it as a runway. The date was announced in September and stands exactly where it was put. The Kingdom sets its dates with care, and then it keeps them.
I. The brief is the country
Saudi Arabia is an open brief at national scale. New cities need names people will remember. Destinations need identities that survive first contact with a visitor. Institutions being built from the ground up need a voice. Vision 2030 is the context; the work lives in the thousands of decisions underneath it: what to preserve, what to change, who gets to decide.
None of this is new. HungerStation’s “The Subconscious Order” took the Creative Commerce Grand Prix at Cannes Lions in 2023, a Saudi brand and a Saudi insight at the top of the industry’s own category. This year’s metal shows the 2023 win was an opening, not a ceiling.
The audience for that work is expanding at a pace few markets can match. The Ministry of Tourism counted roughly 116 million domestic and inbound tourists in 2024. Not every one is an international visitor; every one is an encounter with a place whose identity is being communicated through signage, service, film and screen. Each encounter carries a story about what this country values. The creative industry’s job is to make that story true, memorable and ours.
And the calendar is unforgiving in the best way. Expo 2030 opens in Riyadh less than three years after LIONS Riyadh closes. The FIFA World Cup follows in 2034. The ideas that will represent this country to the world in those years are being commissioned now. A festival in December 2027 sits at exactly the point where a relationship formed can still shape work delivered.
Minister of Media Salman Al-Dossary said creativity and storytelling have deep roots in Saudi Arabia and in Middle Eastern culture. He is right, and the industry’s own record now agrees with him.
II. Why Tahaluf, and why this design
LIONS did not choose Riyadh in isolation. In the same week, it folded VidCon into its North American festival and rebranded Spikes Asia as LIONS Asia for Singapore. The company is redrawing its global map, and Riyadh received the furthest-dated pin and, I would argue, the most consequential one.
It also chose a delivery partner with a specific record. Tahaluf, the joint venture between Informa, the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones, and the Events Investment Fund, has in four years built the platforms through which the Kingdom’s sectors now convene: LEAP for technology, Black Hat MEA for cybersecurity, Cityscape Global for real estate, Money20/20 Middle East for finance, the Global Health Exhibition for healthcare. The company reports more than 100,000 international attendees travelling to Saudi Arabia and $17.6 billion in cumulative economic impact since 2022. Those are company-reported figures. The cadence behind them is visible to anyone who has stood in the Malham halls in November.
Faisal bin Saud Al-Khamisi, Tahaluf’s Co-Chairman, pointed to Expo 2030 and the 2034 World Cup as evidence that the Kingdom has shown its readiness to convene the world. The operative word is readiness. Tahaluf is the mechanism that turns readiness into a date, a hall and a room full of the right people.
Two design decisions tell me this festival has been thought through rather than franchised.
First, there is no awards competition. Dubai Lynx remains the region’s prize platform. That restraint keeps LIONS Riyadh from becoming another trophy night and forces it to compete on the only thing that brings a chief marketing officer back a second time: what is said on stage and what is commissioned afterward. Content is the product.
Second, the organizers intend an alliance with Athar, the Saudi Festival of Creativity, rather than a rival calendar. Coordination over competition is how a creative ecosystem is built. It is also a signal that the Saudi creative community is being treated as the host, not the audience.
III. What the room has to do
Here is where I stop reporting and start arguing. A festival is only as strong as its editorial spine, and the spine of LIONS Riyadh should be made from Saudi work, shown the way work is actually made.
Not the finished film. The moment the brief changed. The line that was cut, the image that finally held, the argument between a Saudi filmmaker and a brand commissioner that improved the result. That is useful to a graduate in her first agency job and gripping to someone who has commissioned work for thirty years.
Put a craft practitioner beside a contemporary designer and ask what it takes to carry a regional tradition into a new product or space without reducing it to costume: which details carry meaning, what can change, who decides. Few places on earth offer richer ground for that question, because here the answers are being lived out in public, at scale, right now.
Artificial intelligence belongs on the program, but the session that would matter begins with Arabic. Run a joke, a proverb, a Najdi expression through the tool and ask a writer and a technologist where the result convinces and where a human still has to step in. Stage that in Riyadh and you have a session no other LIONS festival can host with the same authority.
These are an editor’s wishes, not announced elements of the program. They share one principle: a carefully chosen Saudi example can open a question that matters to the whole room. That is how a regional festival becomes internationally necessary rather than locally pleasant.
Thea Skelton, Senior Vice President of LIONS Festivals, put the company’s own view this way: “Global expertise is most valuable when it connects meaningfully with local context.” The traffic has to run both ways. Saudi creatives gain from the world’s experience. The world gains from paying close attention here, for three days, with the city outside the hall supplying context no deck can.
The forecast
Here is mine, and I will stand by it. By the time Expo 2030 opens, some of the work the world sees about Saudi Arabia will trace back to conversations that begin in KAFD in December 2027: a commissioner who met a maker, a graduate who heard how a brief really changed, an international creative director who left with an idea she did not bring.
When I coined #BySaudiForSaudi more than a decade ago, it meant one thing: open the door to the world, and keep what is behind it authentic. Stories told from within, with enough confidence to invite the world into the room and let it listen. LIONS Riyadh is the room. Tahaluf is building it. The first voice to take the microphone should be Saudi, and it should begin with a story the rest of the room has never heard.
