In this Cairns Crocodiles wrap, Shyaire Ganglani reflects on the conversations, contradictions and creative tensions that she believes defined this year’s festival. The Leo Australia associate creative director argues that beneath the sunshine, yacht parties and industry buzz, one idea kept resurfacing across sessions: if the industry wants better outcomes, it needs to stop building systems where convenience, consensus and safety consistently beat originality, inclusion and meaningful change.
It’s been two glorious days of sunshine, big hair, big yarns and the biggest smiles. And maybe some torrential rain that made the days feel cosy amongst the heat, which is nearly an impossible vibe to curate, but hey, nature wanted vibes for us.
Cairns does this thing where it softens the industry in a good way. Not in a corny “we’re all one big family” way, but in the practical sense that when your lanyard is sticking to your sternum and your hair has entered its Mimi from the The Drew Carey Show era (sorry not sorry about this reference), you stop performing so hard.
People still show up polished, of course, but the humidity has a funny way of making honesty the least effortful option. You can feel it in the rooms and the best sessions weren’t trying to win you over with one liners, they were trying to name the friction properly, then sit in it long enough for it to become useful. Which I can attest to being…a very bloody hard thing to do.
Across the talks I went to, I kept noticing the same tension surfacing, even when the topics had nothing to do with each other. The industry keeps saying it wants better outcomes, more ethical behaviour, more inclusive stories, braver creativity, and purpose that actually matters. Then we keep building conditions in which the easiest option wins, where convenience beats conscience, where safety beats originality, where inclusion is treated like a finishing touch, and where purpose lives in copy rather than systems. It’s not that anyone in the room was naive about that. It’s that…this year, more speakers were willing to say the sharp version out loud.
The debate club’s ‘Your Consumers Don’t Give AF About Sustainability’ chats put that pattern under a microscope and to be real, it landed because it didn’t shame anyone for being human. It told the truth about what humans do when price, habit, time and aesthetics enter the chat. One line basically wrapped the whole argument in a bow you can’t untie.
“Consumers do care about sustainability right up until it becomes a little inconvenient, a little more expensive or a little less aesthetic.”
That sentence hits because it explains so much of the “why” behind the say-do gap without turning consumers into villains. It also forces a harder question onto brands and marketers: if the sustainable choice keeps feeling like the inconvenient choice, what exactly are we expecting to happen?
Another quote highlights the contradiction beneath much modern virtue signalling, whether from individuals or corporations: “We do want ethical consumption, but without consuming less.” That’s not so much a moral failure as it is a design problem. It’s a systems problem. Which is why the most grown-up frame from the debate was: “It’s not a care factor, it’s a balance problem.”
When you build a world where the “good” option costs more, takes longer, looks worse, or feels socially invisible, then you don’t get to act shocked when people choose convenience. You can be disappointed, sure. You can also take responsibility for what’s been made easy.
That same idea showed up again in the representation panel, wearing a different outfit. We love. The room wasn’t debating whether inclusion matters because pfft, that’s entry-level stuff. The actual conversation was about where inclusion goes when it’s real. The answer, repeatedly, was: it has to live in the idea, in the writing, in the early decisions. One quote summed it up so well: “We embed cultural or any type of inclusion, it has to come from that ideational concept development point, not towards the end of the production and just kind of tick a box.”
What made this panel strong was that it didn’t pretend that the barriers are mysterious. The pipeline is fragile. People fear “getting it wrong.” Consultation becomes a single meeting rather than a thread that runs through the whole process. And then, the line that should be laminated on our walls and attached to our emails. “Doing nothing at all is worse than probably getting it wrong.” That’s the part that separates values from action. If you don’t begin early, involve the right people properly, and keep them involved, then the work stays shallow, no matter how many good intentions you wrap around it.
The ‘Creativity Needs Different Brains’ session carried the same theme into workplace culture, and it did it in a way that made it hard to brush off as a “nice to have.”
It framed neurodiversity as a creative advantage and a business advantage. The honeybee metaphor made the point in a way you can repeat to someone who only speaks KPI: “The honeybee colony survives because of its diversity, not its uniformity.”
Then Charlotte Adorjan went one step further into the language of the boardroom: support neurodivergent talent properly, and you get more output and stronger performance. More honey, more money, more funny!
The part that stuck with me wasn’t even the productivity stats..shock!
It was the warning about what overly “nice” cultures do to creative work, the talk calling out the cooperation trap, where harmony gets treated like the goal and challenge gets shut down or punished.
“We have to stop hiring for politeness,” was the spicy version of that. Kindness is good. Don’t get them wrong but consensus is not the same as quality, and a room full of agreeable people can still produce work that slides off the brain.
The best punchline, and honestly the most commercially honest line of the week, was “The most expensive thing an ad can be is boring.” If anyone wants a single sentence to justify fighting for a braver idea, that’s it.
Then the fantasy-and-obsession panel arrived as an antidote to blandness everywhere, without resorting to the usual “be bold” motivational poster routine. It got specific about what memorable work actually requires: trust, risk, discomfort, and a willingness to let something be polarising if that’s what it takes to make it stick.
Tigis Nirma spoke about using familiar formats as a Trojan horse to bring audiences into unfamiliar cultural worlds, and she kept circling this desire to create “extreme obsession,” the kind of storytelling that makes people create back, not just consume. She also dropped a line that quietly dismantles so much lazy “universal” storytelling: “There is no one single human story.” It’s obvious, but it’s also exactly what gets forgotten when brands keep trying to appeal to everyone and end up speaking to no one.
Tim from Didi pushed a similar argument from a marketing angle, basically saying stop chasing approval as your primary metric.
He framed success around recall and memorability, not broad likeability, and delivered a line that made people laugh because it’s painfully true: “Best in class is mediocrity.” Adam, who creates visuals for Chemical Brothers live shows, offered the simplest creative truth of all: second-guessing kills originality. “Every time I’m trying to please someone else, the work suffers.” If you’ve ever watched an idea get sanded down in a review process until it becomes wallpaper, you felt that.
Even the conversations about engagement and format pointed to the same underlying shift: attention is no longer passive, and pretending it is makes everyone work harder for worse results. The G-RUIN session was built around participation because people don’t just want to sit and receive a panel anymore. They want to be in it, posting, reacting, voting, playing along. The tone (from the inside) was self-aware, fast, and designed for the internet brain we all pretend we don’t have. One line summed up the realism of it: “The only reason you are on panel is to post a banger on LinkedIn.” And since we can admit that’s happening, we can design something that uses it, right? Right? Nervous laughs.
Taika Waititi’s conversation ended up feeling like the week’s emotional thesis because he described creativity as living in that unstable space where you lose your footing. “Walking out into the ocean, and you start to lose your footing. That is the perfect space to be creative.”
He wasn’t romanticising chaos, he was pointing at the moment most people rush to escape. The wobble. The uncertainty. The bit where you can’t rely on your usual tricks. He made a case for staying there long enough to find something original, instead of sprinting back to the safe idea just to feel competent. But I wrote a whole separate article about that here.
The purpose and travel session rounded out the week with the same practical message dressed as values: purpose only scales when it becomes part of the operating model, not a slogan. “Consumer demand drives corporate change, not company altruism,” was the cleanest articulation of that. It’s not cynical, it’s grounding. It says values become real when people can act on them without needing heroic effort, and when businesses build systems that make that action possible.
Jane Evans’ session on matriarchy landed in a similar register, less “inspiration” and more “power is structural.” Her argument wasn’t about individual confidence, it was about collective confidence, solidarity, and seniority, and about building an equal force alongside patriarchy rather than asking politely to be included. It was a reminder that access is not the same as power, and that progress can stall or slide when the room gets too comfortable.
So here’s my point of view after two sun-drenched days and a rain-soaked third: Cairns this year wasn’t a festival of lofty ideals, it was a mirror held up to defaults. Over and over, across topic after topic, the same challenge surfaced. If we keep saying we want better outcomes, then we have to stop building conditions that reward the easiest option and then acting surprised when the easiest option wins. Sustainability needs to be made livable, not just desirable.
Representation needs to be written into the bones of the work, not added when the shoot is already booked. Creative cultures need to make room for friction, oddness, and challenge without labelling it “difficult.” Purpose needs mechanisms, not poetry. And I say that as a poet, so take it with a bucket of salt (sea salt from the croc island).
That’s the gift of these three days, when it’s working. You leave with sharper language for the friction you’ve been feeling all year, and enough conviction to take that friction back into the parts of the job where it actually matters. Not the stage…or the wonderful Pinterest activations (which were heaps of fun btw), not even the glorious welcome party with a drone show.
The real work, in the rooms, and over a beer and yarn, is where decisions get made.
