A seasoned leader and industry trailblazer, Vanessa Ho Nikolovski has served on prestigious juries, including Spikes Asia, Cannes Lions, and now the 2025 Dubai Lynx Awards, where she will lead the PR Jury.
Known for her ability to choreograph impactful work in a world where attention is increasingly fleeting, Nikolovski brings a wealth of experience and insight to the judging room.
As she enters her fourth decade in agency life, spanning Hong Kong, New York, and Singapore, her passion for navigating the complexities of modern communication remains as vibrant as ever.
At Weber Shandwick, Nikolovski has built a reputation for fostering enduring client relationships while championing creativity, culture, and innovation to deliver work that truly moves and matters.
In this interview, Campaign Middle East sits down with Vanessa to explore what she’s looking for in standout PR campaigns, her perspective on creativity in the region, and how brands can create meaningful connections in an ever-changing world.
What will you be looking for in the Jury room?
I’m looking forward to rigorous deliberation and discussion and some debate driven from collective insights, broad experience and diverse perspectives from the Jury. It’s exciting and a great honour to celebrate and reward the most effective creative work across the Middle East and North Africa, and we’ll want to have everyone’s voice in the mix and all perspectives considered.
From my experience, this is where maintaining an open and respectful process of listening, learning, and enriching will refine the collective thinking, eliminate blind spots, and get us to our ultimate decision. And building professional camaraderie through this great experience will, I’m sure, also make us industry friends for life!
What do you expect to see from the work in the PR category at Dubai Lynx 2025?
This is really a time for the power and effect of ‘earned’ to bring impact and value for brands and companies like never before.
In the PR category, we’ll be looking at whether the creative idea has ‘earned at the core’ – has it earned attention, engagement and impact or has it mainly relied on paid. Also, did it have cultural relevance for its audience, community, brand, company; and, critically, what its impact was beyond the flashy coverage – did it achieve against its objectives.
What’s the best piece of advice you’d give to PR agencies submitting work to the Awards this year?
In addition to the above, I’d say focus on the sub-category you are putting the work in for – make sure you spend a bit of time/space explaining why the work is relevant to that sub-category rather than just putting in the exact same entry into multiple categories. We’re going to be looking at everything in detail, so communicating specific relevance and impact will not be lost.
What challenges do you see industry professionals facing today in the realm of PR, and how might these challenges influence the type of work that is celebrated at Dubai Lynx?
The power of and necessity for diversity to bring breadth and dimension of insights, cultural viewpoints and ultimately creative excellence to our work is tough to do in the face of time, resource and budget pressures in the PR industry today. We have to consciously and deliberately build diversity in our teams if we want to truly elevate our ideas and our work.
Additionally, bringing the right analytics and measurement is another area that gets squeezed out for the same reasons. Work needs to have both these critical ingredients to truly make a difference and solve for the need. Our goal is to show what this work looks like as a benchmark for the industry to have as a touchstone this year.
The countdown to creativity is on as entries for the Dubai Lynx Awards remain open until 23 January 2025. The winners will be unveiled at the highly anticipated Awards Ceremony on 9 April 2025.
For more details on the Awards and submission guidelines, visit www.dubailynx.com/awards.
