At each conference I’ve attended over my career, there is always a moment where the fog lifts and something becomes clear(er). Sometimes it is immediate – a single, unifying idea – completely in focus. More often, it is less tangible, but there. Apparent, but not quite fully formed, it slowly morphs into a mass you can grasp. At Cairns Crocodiles, presented by Pinterest, that idea arrived early and never really left. In this op-ed, Hatched Media CEO and managing partner Stephen Fisher explains why weird wins.
In a world where AI is already homogenising everything at a scale and pace that is almost incomprehensible and invisible, the single most powerful thing that will cut through – for brands, businesses, agencies and humans – is to refuse to conform to the norm.
Do things different. Deliberately. Or put a little more directly. Be weird.
For an industry that has been on a crusade to optimise, find efficiency and productivity, to apply norms and benchmarks, and define itself through process and structure, it was a little bit of a shock to the system. Cairns Crocodiles stated it loud and proud. And repeated it day in, day out.
It was a magical counterpoint to where we find ourselves right now.
Let’s be clear about what is happening in businesses today, the length and breadth of the nation. AI tools — generative image platforms, large language models, automated media-buying systems — are without doubt extraordinary. I use many myself. They are productive. They are genuinely useful and revolutionising the way we work and live.
But they share a common trait: they regress toward the mean. They are, by design, trained on what already exists. They produce what is most likely, not what is most remarkable. They skew towards the averages.
And so, as each brand in a category begins to use the same tools, pull from the same data pools and optimise toward the same performance signals, the output begins to converge. Different logos, same soul.
Different copy, same cadence. More of the same, same, same.
The hard truth, apparent but ignored, is that we’re getting more efficient and producing campaigns that fewer people are remembering.
In a time where the average consumer consumes thousands of brand messages a day, ad recall is falling. The industry is suffering from quiet precision and an attention recession.
This was the context Taika Waititi walked into. For many, the highlight of the conference.
The man of the hour
It was a left (very left!) of centre hour, disruptive to the point where I don’t quite know how Edwina McCann got through it. He was a total goofball, loose, digressive, chaotic and occasionally even unnerved himself.
He was wonderfully weird. And entirely memorable.
In being so, he made the argument more powerfully than any slide deck could: authentic strangeness is magnetic in a way that optimised sameness never will be. It was a force of nature.
The more formal counterpart to Waititi’s keynote was the brilliant Amy Kean’s session on Weirdism — a creative philosophy built on the radical premise that the industry’s greatest mistake is trying to sand down the rough edges of genuinely original ideas until they are palatable, focus-group-approved and forgettable.
Kean’s argument was direct: ideas that change culture are almost always the ones that, at first glance, seem slightly off. Too specific. Too strange. Too committed to a vision that nobody asked for, and in doing so gave us the soundbite of the whole conference – “this is not a bug — it is a feature”.
In a session I didn’t see but read about afterwards, Paula Bloodworth brought this from the abstract into the real. Her account of the creative work behind the Idris Elba anti-knife-crime campaign — raw, confrontational and deeply uncomfortable in all the right ways — demonstrated what happens when an agency and a client agree to stop chasing safety. The work was not optimised. It was felt. And it changed things.
And then came John Evans, the Uncensored CMO, bringing a useful counterweight. His message was that the industry has developed a dangerous habit of measuring what is easy rather than what matters. Metrics that tell you a lot about algorithm performance and almost nothing about whether your brand is building equity in a human mind. He posed a killer question… what would you do if you weren’t afraid?
He spoke with CRA chief executive Lizzie Young about how marketers are uniquely positioned to rise to the CEO role but are being held back by an inability to speak the language of the boardroom, trading in creative-speak rather than ROI, vision and business change. The best marketers act like founders, maintaining a direct and daily connection to the customer. On the growing pressure to cut budgets and chase short-term performance, Evans was blunt: going short when competitors do the same is a losing strategy, and the data overwhelmingly supports long-term brand investment.
The research is unambiguous on this point: brand distinctiveness is one of the strongest predictors of long-term commercial success. And distinctiveness, almost by definition, requires doing something different.
And doing it differently deliberately. Resisting the pull toward the category average. It requires a little weirdness.
The problem, as Evans noted, is that most organisations are structurally incapable of acting on this insight. The pressure to justify every dollar spent pushes teams toward metrics that can be reported in a dashboard. Creativity that cannot be immediately attributed to a conversion event tends to get cut. And so the portfolio gradually drifts toward the measurable. And dare I say it, the mediocre.
Putting it into practice
But for me, Cairns wasn’t all diagnosis. It also offered IRL studies of what it looks like when brands genuinely commit to distinction.
Tim Farmer from Didi, who approved perhaps the weirdest ad in recent memory, summed it up perfectly when asked about the risk of such creative. It was a bigger risk to do nothing, to play the category norms, to accept the status quo.
McDonald’s x Squid Game collaboration (which claimed a Grand Prix) on paper probably should not have worked. A global QSR brand inserting itself into one of the world’s most violent streaming properties feels risky. Instead, it became one of the most-shared brand moments of the past year. The reason was that the collaboration was built on genuine courage: a willingness to let the Squid Game world shape the execution, rather than the other way around. The brand served the culture. It did not colonise it.
And here was another theme. Brands that show up in culture by adding something — a perspective, a creative contribution, an unexpected point of view — earn the right to be there. Brands that simply bolt themselves onto existing cultural moments and hope the equity rubs off most often don’t.
The irony of it all
So, finally, we get to the nub of the thing. The irony of Cairns in 2026.
The technology that we’re racing toward is creating a state of homogeneity that makes originality more valuable than ever.
AI producing competent content at scale is simply raising the floor for everyone. But the real, killer fact is that the ceiling has been blown away. The opportunity is only getting bigger for those who can produce work that is genuinely different. Average will get cheaper as we’ve seen in numerous instances already. Great will get rarer and more precious. And great might just be reliant more than ever on being different. Being distinctive. Dare I say it. Being weird.
Cairns Crocodiles did not offer the industry a comfortable prognosis. It offered an honest one. The technology is coming regardless. The homogenisation is already underway. The question is not whether to accept this reality but what to do with it.
The answer, it turns out, is old and simple AND harder than it sounds: do something only you could do.
Stephen Fisher is the CEO of media agency Hatched.
