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The Fort, a Johannesburg based creative & film production company founded in 2006, is led by the young entrepreneurial duo of Shukri Toefy and Amr Singh. The pair initially started the company to pay mounting student loans, and as Singh remarked, ‘we’ve never looked back.’ The Fort now has a track record, and has formed strategic alliances in Dubai. “We have an interesting relationship with Dubai, and we do a lot of work within their ad industry,” says Singh, Creative Director. “In the last 10-15 years, Dubai has really grown out of nothing and there’s been a lot of foreign direct investment into it, as well as investment from within Dubai itself. But what it means is that there’s no real, established industry in Dubai – which is particularly true for advertising.” He adds: “We have this interesting situation whereby a lot of big multinationals are moving their head offices to a location where marketing and communications hasn’t really operated in the past…If you couple this with the fact that Dubai prides itself on a 100% employment rate, it’s a very difficult environment for freelancers and contractors - so it’s almost been forced into an outsourced model.” Parallels with S.A. Ad Industry According to Singh, when it comes to animation or heavily technical things, Dubai agencies look to the subcontinent – India, Sri Lanka or Pakistan – for help. “But for more nuanced or strategic positioning, they’ve had to look elsewhere,” he explains. “Now the ad industry in Europe and the U.S. is entrenched in a very particular way, but S.A. offers a more agile and nimble look to the region. If you look at the recent Loeries Awards, and how Dubai has looped into the MEA region, which is Middle East and Africa, we kind of have a similar way of storytelling and a similar identity – so we found the fit to be pretty easy.” He adds that as ‘young professionals within the industry,’ it’s also given the agency the opportunity to work with bigger brands and larger budgets – something you wouldn’t necessarily get in SA, where he notes that the industry ‘has a strong, hierarchical structure’. Yas Island Brief Singh explains how one brief forced the agency to truly think out the box. Yas Island, a huge man-made island destination in Dubai, needed to attract visitors to its newly opened mall – and position it as a destination in itself. Screen Shot 2015-09-16 at 3.10.47 PM “The answer was to highlight the entire island as an experience, with the mall as the centrepiece,” says Singh. “The concept that we developed was a race between a parachuter, a skydiver, a jet skier, a go-kart driver, a BMW rider and a skateboarder – and they would all highlight various parts of the mall. They would all converge at some sort of finish line – which was the middle of the mall. When they take off their helmets, we see that it is in fact a family (mom, dad, daughter, son and granddad).” Singh adds: “I don’t think any local mall would put this type of investment into something with un-measurable returns like a TVC…so the region can be a bit of a playground for creativity. A lot can be said for how superficial the region can be, and how transient the region can be. But you can’t ignore how the space has allowed individuals to unlock imagination – and not just in the advertising space…”