HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach Newswire – 10 July 2026 – The inaugural LEAP East 2026 was held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (8-10 July), gathering more than 35,000 technology professionals, policymakers and investors from 30 countries and regions. The three-day event, the first LEAP summit staged outside Saudi Arabia, featured over 340 speakers, 450 exhibitors and over 400 investors, covering cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence, deep tech, smart cities and new energy industries.

“This turnout speaks volumes about the global appeal of LEAP East and the strength of our shared vision,” said Paul Chan, Financial Secretary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (HKSARG) at the opening ceremony of the event. “I am particularly delighted to note that this conference will continue to be held in Hong Kong in the coming three years.”

Other top government officials attending the opening ceremony included Professor Sun Dong, Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry of the HKSARG and Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Saudi Arabia.

The event underscored the deepening partnership between Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia, and highlighted Hong Kong’s role as a unique gateway connecting the Chinese Mainland with the world.

“Hong Kong is perhaps the only city in the world that connects seamlessly to both the Chinese Mainland and the rest of the world at the same time,” Mr Chan said. “Working under the common law system, we have robust protection for intellectual property. As a free port, capital, goods, talent and data freely flow in and out of this city. Simple, low tax is a standing feature of our regime. And we are one of the safest, most stable cities anywhere in the world. These are the foundations on which businesses, talent and creativity thrive.”

Mr Chan invited Saudi and Gulf enterprises to use Hong Kong as an international fundraising and risk-management platform, and expressed the HKSAR’s commitment to further strengthening co-operation with Saudi Arabia in innovation, infrastructure, green technology, healthcare, advanced manufacturing and professional services.

“Innovation needs capital, and Hong Kong is where capital and ideas meet. This is the heart of our ‘Finance+’ strategy – using finance as a powerful enabler to drive the real economy,” Mr Chan said.

Professor Sun noted that the HKSARG’s efforts in promoting innovation and technology (I&T) are bearing fruit. He said the number of start-ups in Hong Kong has surged by 40% since 2021, reaching 5,200 in 2025. The Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou innovation cluster was ranked first globally in the Global Innovation Index 2025 and Hong Kong ranked fourth globally in the World Digital Competitiveness Ranking 2025, and second globally in the World Competitiveness Yearbook 2026.

Hong Kong also topped the world in IPO (initial public offering) in 2025, with 119 listings raising some US$35 billion, including many world tech champions.

Professor Sun also met with Mr Alswaha to exchange views on I&T collaborations between Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.

“This international gathering reflects the rising global I&T momentum, and Hong Kong is proud to serve as a ‘super connector’ and ‘super value-adder’ for international exchanges,” Professor Sun said.

Meanwhile, Mr Chan revealed that he plans to lead a Hong Kong delegation to Saudi Arabia later this year, bringing leading companies in infrastructure, green tech, healthcare and advanced manufacturing, plus professionals in the finance, investment and professional services sector, to explore concrete projects and further partnership.

• 88% or marketers say AI has increased creative output, but only 45% say it has improved creative quality
• 86% believe real-time audience behavior and community signals are important to creative development
• 67% rely on basic demographic data despite 59% agreeing that traditional demographic segmentation is no longer effective.
• Only 17% of marketers always incorporate community insights beyond demographics into Gen AI workflows

New WARC x TikTok x LIONS Advisory research: The new creative advantage – How community signals are reshaping creative success in the age of AI. Introducing the S.C.A.L.E. framework for action

July 14, 2026 – Creativity has entered a new era. Generative AI is transforming how marketing ideas are developed, adapted, and scaled. But real advantage comes from creative that is most relevant, resonant, and connected to the people it is designed to reach.

The brands creating the strongest creative outcomes are increasingly combining the power of AI with the power of community. They’re using participation as intelligence, turning cultural signals into activation, and building creative systems that continuously learn from the audiences they serve. This creates an “intelligence loop” that gives brands a compounding creative advantage.

New research by WARC and LIONS Advisory, in partnership with TikTok, explores how community intelligence is reshaping creative success in the age of AI, and why the future advantage belongs to brands that can learn, adapt, and create alongside culture as it unfolds.

Lexi Wolf, Head of Thought Leadership, LIONS Advisory, says: “WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2026 found that belief in the effectiveness of demographic segmentation is waning. Yet this study with TikTok found that demographics were still the number one input marketers used to brief AI. Meanwhile, participatory media environments are giving us something far richer: real-time signals from people who search, comment, share, remix, create and buy.

“The opportunity isn’t to make the existing system faster. It’s to build a better one: one that helps brands learn from people more continuously, respond with greater speed and relevance, and turn efficiency into effectiveness over time.”

Andy Yang, Global Head of Creative & Brand Ads, TikTok, says: “The brands winning today are not the ones using AI to generate the most content. They are the ones learning the fastest from the people they serve. We call it cultural intelligence, and it is fast becoming advertisers’ most durable competitive advantage.

“Yet the research for this report shows that most brands are briefing powerful AI creative tools with weak inputs: static demographics and legacy assumptions, resulting in creative that scales efficiently but fails to connect. The future belongs to brands that close the loop by creating alongside culture, not behind it.”

Methodology

The research includes findings from a survey of 400 marketers across the UK, US, Australia, and Brazil, conducted in May 2026. All respondents are directly involved in decisions about how marketing creative and content are produced. Additionally, a series of interviews with senior marketers and industry experts was carried out, combined with a review of WARC and TikTok’s global data, industry knowledge, and examples.

Key takeaways outlined in ‘The new creative advantage: How community signals are reshaping creative success in the age of AI’ study are:

In the age of AI, community insights are becoming even more valuable

Most marketers (90%) agree that AI has quickly become part of the creative toolkit. However, while 88% of marketers say Gen AI has increased creative volume, fewer than half (45%) say it has significantly improved quality.

Demographics remain the most common input when prompting AI, say 67% of marketers, despite 59% agreeing that traditional demographic segmentation is no longer effective, according to WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2026 survey. Only 17% of marketers always incorporate community or audience insights into Gen AI workflows.

As scaling creative becomes easier, the advantage is shifting to brands that are best at learning from community insights and use AI to turn live human understanding into more relevant, resonant creative action. Most marketers (86%) say audience behavior and community signals will influence creative development more in the next three years.

Marcos Angelides Managing Director L’Oréal Lab & Head of AI Operations, Publicis Media, says: “Where the advantage comes is the data that you use to train those models, because AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. You’ve got to have behavioral data. You’ve got to know what people actually do, not just what they say they do.”

The Intelligence Loop turns community signals into creative advantage

Most brands are chasing culture – only catching trends after they break. Participatory platforms surface shifts in behavior and cultural momentum while they are still emerging. Community participation continuously generates signals that help creative systems learn, adapt, and improve over time. This becomes an Intelligence Loop: a four-stage cycle in which community participation and AI creative reinforce each other over time:

1. Participation creates signals: Community engagement generates layered cultural and intent signals.

2. Signals reveal demand: Participation data surfaces leading indicators of emerging creative opportunity before it becomes explicit.

3. Demand shapes creative: Signals are routed into the AI briefing process, changing what the tool is working from.

4. Creative fuels participation: Resonant, community-informed work earns stronger engagement, generating fresh signals for the next cycle.

The real value of the Intelligence Loop is the strategic learning each cycle creates. Brands that feed those signals back into their next brief get sharper by creating improved briefs, more resonant creative, which in turn feed back into stronger product, brand and media decisions.

A framework for action: Introducing S.C.A.L.E.

The S.C.A.L.E. framework sets out five principles for using AI to accelerate the loop, from more precise briefs and creator partnerships to stronger governance, optimization and learning. Each step builds on the one before it.

S: Select: Align media and audience objectives first before briefing the AI, then use platform-native signals to shape what gets made.

C: Connect: Treat creators as intelligence sources, not distribution channels. AI-enabled creative systems can make this process more systematic, helping teams identify creators and creator content based on community fit, cultural relevance, and campaign goals, not just reach.

A: Anchor: Input strong, distinctive brand assets into AI to avoid the output looking like every other brand in the same category.

L: Lead: Brands should lead with internal governance by being transparent when using Gen AI, use clear guidelines, encoded before the brief, that make safety a structural feature rather than a last-minute check.

E: Evolve: Brands should treat every campaign as a live learning system and apply findings from one campaign to another. The brands building structural advantage with Gen AI treat measurement and creation as a single continuous process.

The new creative advantage: How community signals are reshaping creative success in the age of AI report is available to read in full here.