Informa Middle East, Dubai, United Arab Emirates: LEAP, Informa Markets PLC

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LEAP is a kinetic verb that evokes immediate ideas of motion and energy, it symbolises the movement from one place to another. This is symbolic of the great pace of change in Saudi Arabia, of the advancement of humankind made possible by tech innovation. When our event LEAP was conceptualised, its objective was to become the go-to platform to discover new technologies and where emerging tech gets adopted first. LEAP’s goals were to positively build on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)’s brand internationally, accelerate digital transformation in the region, position KSA as the epicentre of technology and provide a platform to drive foreign investment and significant economic activity in the region. 

Our marketing approach with LEAP was to make the event ubiquitous in the market. We initiated paid media partnerships with international publications including Wired, Vice and Bloomberg, and featured in 1.96K publications with an online readership of 9.28 billion.   We initiated a social advocacy campaign that ran for eight weeks and generated 35,744,334 impressions, 107,078 clicks and 30,813 organic posts about the event. We launched billboards, hosted podcasts, worked with influencers, commissioned print ads and launched duo-language campaigns and websites. Our approach was to reach all the quality data we could, and we generated 137,473 registrations by the end of the campaign.   

Our production team onboarded 513 industry expert speakers and celebrities, including Luis Figo, Maëlle Gavet (CEO, Techstars), Steven Bartlett (Youngest and Newest Dragon on Dragons' Den), Börje Ekholm (CEO, Ericsson), Dr Makaziwe Mandela (Founder, House of Mandela Family Foundation), Peggy Johnson (CEO, Magic Leap), Kelly Hoppen (Award-winning Interior Designer and Entrepreneur) and more. We used these speakers as advocates for the event to reach their international audiences in an organic way.

We launched the inaugural Rocket Fuel Start-up Competition with a prize fund of $1,000,000 USD. This competition took place over the three days of the event, with attendees able to watch 220 start-ups battle it out on stage to join the final with a celebrity judging panel featuring Dragons' Den Investors James Caan and Steven Bartlett, and BBC's The Apprentice judge Karren Brady.  Our sales team worked tirelessly to onboard 716 global tech companies to exhibit on the exhibition floor, including SAP, Microsoft, Mobily, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, who brought the latest tech innovations to the event for attendees to experience. We saw innovations in Health Tech to Sports Tech, AI to VR. Exhibitors hosted talks at their stands and invited visitors to explore their products and tech on offer. We wanted all visitors and exhibitors to make new connections. This was the first edition of LEAP and we set targets that we believed to be realistic and achievable. We ended up smashing all the targets, for example: 

• The sponsorship revenue target was $4,500,000 USD. We closed $19,100,000 USD 
• We aimed for 80,000+ preregistrations and achieved 137,473 
• The onsite attendee target was 40,000+ and we achieved over 100,000 visits 
• We set out to close 500 exhibitors and brought in 713
• We aimed for 400 global speakers and obtained 506

Creative productions to credit:

• Annabelle Mander and Michael Champion
• All the Informa Markets team
• Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Information and Technology (MCIT)
• Saudi Arabia’s Federation for Cyber Security Programming (SAFCSP)