“You might as well bomb us, because right now I feel like a toad in boiling water” – Those weren’t the words of an activist or an environmental lobbyist.
They came from Surangel S. Whipps, Jr., the President of Palau, who spoke directly to the advertising industry yesterday at the Cairns Crocodiles, the annual event of Travel Weekly‘s associate publication B&T.
While brands debate whether their purpose-led campaigns are “authentic enough” to win a Cannes Lion, or even a Cairns Crocodile, Whipps and his Pacific neighbours are grappling with a far more urgent reality: rising seas, vanishing islands, and the slow erasure of cultures that have existed for millennia.
And yet, on a panel that could have been a funeral for the planet, the mood was not one of despair, but of fierce optimism. Because the creative industry, they argued, has a crucial role to play in this fight. But only if it’s willing to get real.
Joined on stage by Laura Clarke, co-founder of the Palau Pledge and head of impact for Deep Rising; Barbara Humphries, chief creative officer at Droga5 ANZ; and Travel Weekly publisher David Hovenden, CEO of The Misfits Media Company, the panel issued a blunt challenge to the audience: if brands truly care about impact, it’s time to move beyond empty promises and start doing the work that actually matters.
Palau’s story is proof that creativity, when rooted in cultural truth and long-term thinking, can do more than sell — it can save. In 2015, the island nation faced a tourism crisis. With just 18,000 residents and over 160,000 tourists a year, the influx was degrading its ecosystems and local culture.
“It was the wrong kind of tourism,” President Whipps explained.
Clarke, who was living in Palau at the time with her husband, a marine advisor, saw the warning signs and began working with the local community to create a solution, not just for the short term, but a solution that would change the future of the nation for generations to come.
The result was the now-famous Palau Pledge, a promise stamped into every visitor’s passport, written by the children of Palau and asking tourists to act responsibly and leave only “footprints in the sand”.
It was a deceptively simple gesture, but one that cut through the noise of climate rhetoric with cultural clarity. It generated over $6 million in earned media in its first month and became a global case study in how values-led storytelling can shift behaviour and perception.
“It’s all about us working together to protect what is valuable for our children,” President Whipps said.
But Palau’s creative activism didn’t stop at the shoreline. Clarke went on to serve as co-executive producer of Deep Rising, a feature documentary that exposes the geopolitical and ecological risks of deep sea-bed mining.
Deep sea-bed mining is the process of extracting mineral deposits from the ocean floor, typically from depths greater than 200 metres. As terrestrial mineral resources become increasingly depleted and the demand for metals continues to rise, deep-sea bed mining is becoming a more viable option.
However, despite its potential to meet these growing demands, research warns that deep-sea mining could have devastating consequences, including the destruction of fragile marine habitats and the extinction of species. And just to add fuel to the fire, it is a practice already being proposed in parts of the Pacific Ocean the size of India.
With support from the Palauan government, Deep Rising became the launchpad for a global campaign advocating for a moratorium on the practice. But Clarke knew that data alone wouldn’t be enough. The science was clear, mining the deep sea would cause irreversible damage to one of the planet’s last untouched ecosystems, but clarity doesn’t always equal urgency.
That’s where emotion had to step in. “You need the evidence to build credibility,” Clarke said, “but it’s emotion that moves the needle.”
The impact campaign translated dense scientific findings into a powerful public message, reframing the issue as a battle over the future of our shared ocean. Through interactive storytelling and global outreach, the campaign gave people a way to act and a reason to care.
“We don’t have time to play it safe,” Clarke told the audience. “When I say to people, there’s someone who wants to take what belongs to your children, they get it immediately.”
Added President Whipps: “With the Palau Pledge, we brought it back to the children. Because everybody loves their children. They want what’s best for their children. You always have to put it in that frame.”
“I think when we forget about that, we treat the ocean like a garbage dump. We just go and rip it up. We abuse it and we forget the impact. So we really need to help people understand that.
“If you don’t love yourself, how can you love the planet? How can you love others? And so we really need to build on that caring spirit”.
The panel then turned to Tuvalu, another Pacific nation on the brink, where rising seas threaten to erase the country’s physical territory, and with it, its legal status as a nation under international law.
But Tuvalu isn’t fading quietly. Instead, it’s launching a radical project to become the world’s first digital nation, preserving its land mass, language, governance, and cultural heritage in the virtual world.
This groundbreaking work is being developed in collaboration with Droga5 ANZ, under the creative leadership of Barbara Humphries. She described the experience as “completely different from any commercial brief,” driven not by KPIs or brand equity, but by survival and sovereignty.
While the idea of a virtual nation may once have sounded like a tech gimmick, for Tuvalu, it’s a strategic and deeply human response.
“This was no one’s first choice,” said Humphries. “But when the water is literally rising, you start looking for ways to hold on to culture, community and identity in any way you can”.
At a time when greenwashing is a prevalent threat to genuine climate action, the panel turned its attention to the industry’s own credibility crisis. When brands conduct shallow campaigns, like affixing a sustainability sticker to business-as-usual operations, the damage goes beyond surface-level cynicism, it erodes public trust and distracts from the kind of work that’s actually creating impact.
“That creates a culture where people don’t see brands on merit or see authenticity in it, which can be damaging.”
So what separates signal from noise? According to Clarke, it’s not the size of the budget or the flashiness of the execution, it’s the motivation behind it.
“You actually have to care,” she said. “You can’t just be chasing awards. Your values and your compass have to align with the work.
“It’s on all of us to be creating the right kind of work. We need to challenge the definitions of what sustainability can mean, there’s so many ways that we can look at it.
“By using the skills that we have as a creative industry, gradually it becomes something that people will inspire people.”
President Whipps echoed that philosophy with a more personal example. Wearing a shirt made entirely from recycled plastic bottles collected from Palau beaches, he explained that the goal isn’t to glamourise waste, it’s to repurpose it.
“This doesn’t mean we should go make more plastic,” he said. “It means we should turn something bad into something good.”
For Whipps, it was a tangible symbol of what climate action looks like when it’s grounded in care, not convenience: messy, iterative, and full of obstacles, but always worth it.
“Our motivation shouldn’t go away because of roadblocks, we have to jump over and go around and just get it done,” President Whipps said.
The message from the Pacific is clear: the climate crisis isn’t abstract, and it isn’t tomorrow’s problem, it’s already here. But as this panel made powerfully evident, it’s not too late to act. In fact, the creative industry holds one of the most influential tools in the fight: the power to shape stories, shift perceptions and inspire change at scale.
The Palau Pledge, Deep Rising, and Tuvalu’s digital nation aren’t just powerful ideas, they’re proof that creativity, when guided by purpose and partnership, can help protect what’s irreplaceable. These are campaigns born not in boardrooms, but in lived experience. They’re not brand assets, they’re cultural lifelines.
And while brands and agencies may not be able to immediately halt rising seas, they can choose what they amplify. They can choose whether to create distractions or help deliver solutions. They can choose to keep “playing it safe,” or use their platforms to stand for something that truly matters.
Because as President Whipps reminded us, “We all want what’s good. But sometimes we get blown off course. We have to bring that goodness out.”
