Tommy Lexen

I’m a senior creative leader and strategist who shapes what culture, live experiences and location-based entertainment becomes next, identifying shifts in audiences, culture and technology early, and turning them into what a company builds and why. For 20 years, across 4 continents, I’ve connected strategy, creative and delivery on work that reaches millions. Working with executive teams, I’ve shaped what’s worth building and why people will pay for it, travel for it and remember it, then held creative ambition together with commercial and operational reality so it opens on time, on budget and at scale. This includes World Expo pavilions in Osaka and Dubai, permanent immersive attractions and LBE experiences for Mandai (Singapore), TopGolf (China) and Miral (Abu Dhabi), live shows for Valley of Wonder (China) and the Dubai World Cup (UAE), and multiple entertainment assets for the NEOM and Qiddiya giga-projects. 

I’ve spent my whole life in this industry and years making the work before I led it, so I bridge the teams delivering and the leadership setting direction. I’ve worked hand-in-hand with technologists and data teams since 2019, putting AI and new tools to real use while keeping the live, human moment that holds the value at the centre.

Where I add value:

Helping you back projects before they’re proven. The highest-value call a company makes is also the rarest: committing to a new category – a format or destination that doesn't exist yet – ahead of the market, while it's still a risk. I've made that call on large-scale national and international projects, not on instinct alone but by weighing data and human judgement together, then committing real conviction and resource once the case holds.

Turning emerging signals into new audience experiences. Understanding why a particular experience, for a particular audience at a particular moment, becomes something they cannot find anywhere else. Data shows what audiences already respond to; the harder work is forming a view on what has no track record yet – the opportunity a predictive model cannot see because it has not happened. That judgement has been sharpened by years spent close to audiences and writing publicly about where culture is going.

Shaping the formats that don't exist yet. Embedding new tools including AI, real-time, immersive tech, into experiences and ways of reaching audiences that weren't possible before, and knowing what will last and what's a passing trick. It's how a company gets past the format everyone already has, to the one that defines the next few years.

Leading capital-intensive developments with discipline. Permanent, complex experiences with fixed opening dates, many partners and several countries in play – delivered without the ambition thinning or the budget running away. Expos are an unforgiving school: you open on a date that cannot move, in front of a paying public, with a nation watching. That discipline is what makes a big, expensive bet safe to take.

Building and empowering the team that makes success repeatable. Doing this once is a project; doing it again and again is a company. I've built the studios and operating models that let ambitious work scale and, equally important, recruited and grown the people who run them and trusted them with it, so the capability lives in the team rather than in any one person.