Leaders from Aston Martin, Facebook, MediaCom, Microsoft and Nestle are set to congregate in Dubai for next week’s inaugural Festival of Media MENA event.

The Festival will take place at Jumeirah Zabeel Saray’s MusicHall, on the iconic Palm Jumeirah Island, on Wednesday 15 April, chaired by AOL’s inimitable ‘forecaster’ David Shing.

The day will kick off with a keynote session from Facebook’s global marketing director Sarah Personette, who will discuss what ingredients are needed by brands, agencies and media owners to be truly innovative.

Aston Martin global marketing director Simon Sproule will outline how luxury brands create original, engaging content, while Xaxis MENA managing director Marcus Siddons will join a panel discussion exploring what impact programmatic trading is having in the Middle East.

Ben Phillips, global head of mobile at MediaCom, will unpick MENA’s peculiarly sluggish mobile market with Mashable Europe’s advertising director Ben Maher, Millennial Media’s EMEA managing director Zac Pinkman and Nestle Middle East digital marketing manager Joseph Sindaha.

Twitter’s managing director for MENA, South East Asia and India, Parminder Singh, will address how brands can take advantage of the collision of traditional and new digital media channels.

A talent debate will take place, featuring the contributions of Starcom MediaVest Group’s MENA chief executive John Antoniades and SAP Middle East and Africa HR director Nelly Boustany.

Finally, Microsoft’s global innovation guru JC Oliver will investigate how innovation is defined and why its first endeavour must be ‘wrong’ in order to be proved ‘right’.

See the full list of Festival of Media MENA speakers here

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