Here, Sive Buckley, managing partners of Born Creators Group, gives perhaps the most comprehensive and beautifully written recollection of Cairns Crocodiles, presented by Pinterest, that you’re likely to come across.
There’s a particular kind of buzz that hits you when you land in Cairns for Crocodiles, made up of equal parts humidity, a massive cold crocodile and half-familiar faces from every agency you’ve ever brushed past.
This was my first one, and I arrived with a little bit of first-day-of-school energy, the kind that hits a little harder when you know plenty of people on the ground but you’re walking in from an indie shop rather than the cool HoldCo club.
I had even spent the Uber ride rehearsing the answer to that awkward “where are you from” opener, trying to work out whether they meant Ireland, Sydney, or where I actually work.
But I was wrong to worry.
I left the 3 days with a notebook full of half-sentences, a phone full of notes and a quiet conviction that something in our industry is actually shifting, and for me this year, that shift hit in a way I won’t shake for a while.
Day 1: Discomfort, AI, and a Sugar Cane Field Full of Vibes
The morning sessions set the bar instantly, with Maz opening in that irreverent, slightly chaotic vibe that has quietly become Crocodiles’ signature, before handing over to Nedd Brockmann, which really set the tone for what was yet to come.
If you only know Nedd as the guy who ran from Cottesloe to Bondi, you’re missing the better story. He’s the 2026 Young Australian of the Year because of his work with Mobilise, which has quietly reframed how a generation thinks about charity and homelessness.
Nedd went on to be one of the most genuinely uninterested-in-pleasing-anyone speakers I’ve seen in years, and told us all how to grab life by the plums.
Enter Najoh Tita-Reid, formerly of Mars Petcare and one of the sharpest voices on AI I’ve heard all year (luckily, there actually wasn’t too much AI chat across the 3 days), followed by an F1 metaphor that’s been rattling around my head ever since.
The point of the tools we have now, she argued, is not to aspire to be the driver but to be the race engineer, the person orchestrating everything from the side of the track, because the tech is fast and powerful, but the taste and judgment behind it is still ours.
Najoh’s warning was just as clear, which is that AI lures companies into a productivity trap where the efficiency story is seductive and the cost-cutting story is even more so, and the brands that win in the next five years won’t be the ones that automated their way to the bottom but the ones that used the tools to make space for the humans.
A private lunch followed, hosted by StackAdapt. The panel on independents vs non meant trust and transparency was, in the best way, a little uncomfortable. People were saying out loud what most of us only say privately, which made it one of those rare “dirty room” moments that had everyone engaged.
The afternoon brought Taika Waititi, who was every bit as brilliantly unhinged as you’d expect, weaving creativity, chaos, and the gentle art of losing your footing into something that somehow added up by the end.
Tom Fodgen was then followed by Sir Martin Sorrell, in a session centred on AI, mergers, and the modern shape of marketing. What I’ll remember just as clearly as the content is how many people got up and left at the start of the talk.
One of the most significant voices in our industry, and the room voted with its feet, which is a moment worth sitting with because it tells you something about attention spans and maybe who we’ve quietly become as an industry when drinks have started to be hosted… regardless, it was their loss and a wonderful session.
And then… The Pinterest Welcome Party.
Viewing it through my Events Unlimited brain, I was blown away. The “Extra Celestial” theme, inspired by Pinterest’s own predicts report, was executed at a level you don’t often see – I mean ever – and they drove us out into the middle of a working sugar cane field where iridescent textures, holographic detailing, and immersive art installations by Sydney and Cairns artists, pulling the whole thing into another galaxy. Yes, there was glitter everywhere.
There was a drone show overhead, while guests indulged in tomahawk steaks swinging from a live fire (and the best corn I’ve ever eaten). The whole night felt less like a conference and more like an exclusive, slightly otherworldly creative rave.
As someone who constantly thinks about production and experience design, it was a masterclass and easily one of the best events I have ever seen.
Day 2: I’ll Be Talking About This Day All Year
If Day 1 set the bar, Day 2 was the day that rewired my brain.
Jon Evans opened with that quiet, founder energy I bloody love, and his core argument was something we have been preaching for years now, which is that success is determined by the distance between you and the customer, not the dashboards or the boards, but the actual person buying the ‘thing.’
The best marketers, in his view, act like founders and live at the coalface, translating insight into action without burning eighteen months on a deck along the way.
A few of his lines I scribbled down and keep coming back to. Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it matters, because you can measure and be wrong, or not measure and be right. And so much of what has worked forever has been instinct, in which we’ve become reliant on data to the point of forgetting it. He shared a quote from Greg Hahn, the founder of Mischief, that every new client gets asked at the start of an engagement: what would you do if you weren’t afraid?
Adam Ferrier and Paula Bloodworth took the stage together next, and that session got us all thinking differently. The headline of their talk was “Don’t steal from culture, add to it,” which required listening for anyone who has ever sat in a meeting where someone unironically said, “Let’s tap into culture.” A few of their lines that landed hardest:
- Committees dilute good ideas. Small teams with real responsibility win.
- Culture doesn’t sit still, so stop treating it like it does.
- Find out who you are, then do it on purpose… and quickly.
Paula came on stage with a three-month-old baby napping in the back room, and somehow held the audience without ever performing the difficulty of it, which is its own kind of leadership. She was, in the most genuine sense, a super-mum oozing cool while talking about how to turn collaboration into conviction by being patient enough to let ideas take shape and trusting enough in the people around you to back them. The whole thing felt like an exhale.
Xanthe Wells followed in the most fabulous Gucci jacket I’ve ever seen and said the thing a lot of people have been thinking but not saying: “The best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline.” She made the case for designing for action instead of attention, reframing the brief from “how do we keep them here” to “how do we send them back to their lives,” and the whole session was effectively an argument for less screen time and more scream time (do yourself a favour and find the DIY paper crocodile if you haven’t already).
It also lined up exactly with Pinterest’s own data this year, which showed a 35 per cent rise in non-digital interests on the platform and 81 per cent of users actively seeking digital disconnect, suggesting that the brands winning right now are the ones designing for the exit rather than the hold.
Then, quite possibly the most considered conversation I had at the festival was lunch with the Atlassian crew. Sarah Tucker hosted an intimate sit-down between Sunita Gloster AM and Athan Didaskalou, the founder of July, and Athan walked us through the brand’s origin story, which began with a simple yet powerful obsession: building a 10/10 customer experience that wasn’t perfect on paper but felt undeniable in the real world.
That same instinct ran through everything he said next.
A few (or all) of his lines that really stuck:
- Customer feedback isn’t a layer, it’s the foundation. The product was shaped directly by real traveller frustrations.
- Focus is a competitive advantage. No side projects, no distractions, just doing one thing exceptionally well.
- Trust is everything. Internally, externally, with customers. It’s the multiplier.
- Zig when others zag.
- Treat people how they want to be treated. The sale follows.
- Some of the best decisions won’t make sense on paper, and that’s okay.
- Tough periods don’t break good businesses, they sharpen them.
- Genuine partnerships beat opportunistic ones, every time.
- “You’re born with 30,000 days. The best strategic planning I can give you is to think about that.”
The day finished with the kind of chaos that is quintessential Cairns Crocs. A packed Hemingways crowd, Fi Roberts and Ricky Chanana running a full quiz show, and the entire room yelling “spin that wheel” like we’d been training for it our whole lives.
Underneath the fun there was a genuinely serious point, though, because The Experience Advocacy Taskforce, led by Greg (Sparrow) Graham, used the format to name what most of us know but don’t always say out loud, which is that we’re losing good people from this industry to burnout and churn, and the question they put back to the room was as simple as it was sharp: what are you doing to fix it?
Day 3: Big, Bold, Crazy Ideas
The final day was full of fun and opened with “Defining Marketing’s Next Era,” a panel chaired by Melissa Fein with Oliver Allis, Jonathan Kerr and Florence Paoli, and the tension they kept circling was a familiar one: protecting brand equity while still hitting quarterly results is something you can’t really do in isolation, and putting yourself in the customer’s shoes does not automatically mean you know what they actually want.
There was also the case for unlearning, which is a hard sell in an industry that rewards confidence and experience, and their closing warning about a new wave of mistrust around AI is the kind of thing that should be on every Monday agenda.
That theme rolled straight into “Growing in the Attention Recession,” which the panel of Kedda Ghazarian, Lauren Best and Ally Doube argued should really be called “Growing in the Attention Opportunity.”
Their point was powerful (and made us think about Jon Evans in day 1). We’ve been over-investing in social simply because it’s measurable, even though measurable and memorable aren’t the same thing, and there’s already a Gen Z rebellion brewing against smartphones and AI that will shape how the next wave of customers engage with brands long before we’re ready for it.
“Creativity Needs Different Brains,” led by Josh Mann, Charlotte Adorjan, Michael Skarbek and Nat Taylor, was the standout of the morning for me. The stat that stopped me writing was that 48 per cent of people in creative roles identify as neurodivergent, and the panel reframed that not as a workplace challenge but as the actual source of creative advantage.
Charlotte’s story about her son, the youngest ever winner of a D&AD Award, made the room go very quiet in the best way.
The afternoon turned into something close to playful.
Jiunn Shih, the global CMO of Driscoll’s, made a sincere case for swapping popcorn for blackberries and blueberries on your next cinema trip and handed fruit to the front row to prove the point, while Yuli Park from IKEA Korea (who I sat with at Day 2 lunch and exchanged Korean skincare tips with) showed us how they’ve turned a furniture warehouse into a 5km run, a literal in-store sleepover venue and an actual core memory for their customers.
By the time I wandered into the Pinterest “Seal It and Stamp It” activation in the partner space, where the entire brief was to put your phone down and make actual paper cards and notes for the people you love using stamps and stickers, it all started to feel like one coherent argument for getting out of the screen and back into the room.
The day closed with the inaugural Cairns Hatchlings winners, which recognises emerging leaders across APAC with three to eight years in the game, and the brief they were judged on, revealed earlier in the festival by David Ohana, came directly from the United Nations, which is the kind of detail that makes you sit a bit more upright in your seat once you hear who’s behind it.
Watching the next wave of our industry stand up and collect awards for work that actually matters was, frankly, one of my favourite moments. I wanted to hire every single one of them. On the spot.
The main Cairns Crocodiles Awards followed, and watching the work roll across the screen, from Mumbai to Tokyo to Seoul to Sydney, it was hard to walk out thinking advertising’s centre of gravity still sits in New York.
The Best Swag, Brought to You by Pinterest
Cairns Crocodiles will do this to you. Three days of being told to be bolder, to make the irrational bet, to design for the exit, to think like a founder and to do the thing you’d do if you weren’t afraid, and somewhere in there, Pinterest casually offers you a fine line tattoo at their on-site Tattoo Parlour, which feels less like an activation and more like a dare you have to accept.
Don’t worry, Mom – it’s small and can be hidden in a sock and the kind of decision you can only really make when you’re three days in to an event that has spent every waking hour telling you creativity, instinct and a willingness to be a little ridiculous are the only currencies that actually matter.
Taika famously got one too after his keynote (the first three digits of his very first phone number), so as far as the Cairns tattoo company goes, I’m doing alright.
I think Nedd would approve, and I’m certain Athan would.
The 6 AM Flight
The universe wasn’t quite done with me.
My flight out was at 6:00 AM. We sat on the tarmac for an hour, which, for a person running on three hours of sleep and a single, surprisingly stunning Cairns airport Hungry Jack’s coffee, should have been the ultimate test of patience.
Instead, it was the best thing that could have happened.
Because sitting right next to me was David Ohana.
For the next three hours, while David desperately needed sleep, my interrogation began.
Lucky for me, and incredibly unlucky for him, I had a front-row seat to a man who has spent twenty years using storytelling to shift money, command attention, and rewrite policy for the things that matter most. The stories he shared (off the record, on the record, and everywhere in between) were easily some of the best I have ever heard in my life.
It was the kind of conversation that simply does not happen unless the universe aligns every single variable perfectly.
The right flight. The right delay. The right seat. The right person.
The only word for it, really, is serendipity.
The Burnt Toast Theory proven.
What I’m Carrying Home
A few things I’m bringing back, in no particular order.
- Be the race engineer rather than the driver.
- The distance between you and your customer is the only metric that really matters. Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it does.
- Don’t steal from culture, add to it.
- Find out who you are, then do it on purpose.
- Design for the exit.
- Back the irrational bet.
- Spend less on ads and more on the things that matter.
- And when an event tells you to be braver, occasionally, you should take it… literally.
Cairns Crocodiles wasn’t just another conference; it was a reset, the kind that quietly changes the questions you start asking on Monday morning.
I came back to Born Creators Group’s HQ with more ideas than I have time for, which is, on balance, the right problem to have.
If you were in Cairns this year, I hope we crossed paths. If you weren’t, start clearing your calendar for next May!
Now, off to try and get the remaining glitter out of my hair (yes, a week later).
