HOW A FREE

TO CREATIVE
NOT COMMONS
SUCK PRESENTATION
ONLINE THING

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 THIS PRESENTATION CONTAINS
FULL FRONTAL NUDITY
PROFANITY
ADULT THEMES
fig. 1

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 If you’re competing for attention
create intrigue.

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 YOURLOGICALFALLACYIS.COM
CLICK TO VISIT THE (OUTDATED) RESULTS PAGE.

Teach a man to fish and you'll feed him for a

day, teach a child to think and she'll grow up
to enact legislation that limits overfishing and
saves our resources for future generations.

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 TAKEOUTS

SIMPLICITY VISUAL CLEAR

PRIORITY LANGUAGE
If you have more than one
message, you need more than Let imagery and negative Talk to people like they’re
one campaign. Everyone kinda space dominate. Don’t make people. People love that shit.
knows this intellectually, but few everything compete - create a What they’re less fond of is
do the work necessary to enact it clear hierarchy of simple being talked at like they’re a
in practice. It requires a ruthless elements. Invest in good demographic being sold
determination to keep things photography and professional something. Clarity of language
single-minded. The trap is that art directors and designers is also really important -
there are good reasons to add (you can’t replace the 10,000 remove sesquipedalian
things and pruning is hard. hours it takes to be a master). superfluities of verbosity.

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 BELIEVE IN DESTINY
CLICK TO WATCH THE CAMPAIGN TAPE

Love story + absurdity + nudity =

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 TAKEOUTS

IT PAYS TO BE
! SEED WELL HEART
REMARKABLE AND WIDE BEFORE HEAD
To be sharable, an idea needs to The internet is a rather big The Courier Mail and Fox News
be interesting enough that you place, and as such there’s tap into the limbic system, but
would call someone in from thriving and relevant being sensational and
another room to show it to them. communities for every appealing to emotion needn’t
Simply being good isn’t going to campaign e.g. nudist forums, just be in the service of evil. If
do much unless you have a sausage dog boards, or people you want to be effective you
ludicrous budget. Pretty much who like looking at hot naked need to understand the
the higher the eyebrows, the people. Virality is unpredictable, cognitive biases that exist and
higher the chance of success. but you can tip the odds. work with not against them.

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 TAKEOUTS

WRITE THE MAKE ME WHAT’S IN IT

NEWS STORY LOOK GOOD FOR ME?
Write the newspaper article for Consider how a user will look to Humans are paradoxical. We’re
the campaign as if it has their friends sharing the empathic, moral, altruistic
already happened and been campaign. Does it position creatures... but we’re also quite
successful. This forces you to them as a caring human or a selfish and narcissistic.
tell the story of the idea - what whinging hippy? Can you Offering a prize or benefit of
the key insights were, how it leverage an existing social some description doesn’t have
played out, what impact it had. sentiment that your target will to be just for the for-profit
It also forces you to think big be happy to share? It’s not just sector. Give people an
and distil the hook. your brand, it’s theirs too. incentive to engage and share.

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 DONTBEAFUCKINGIDIOT.COM
CLICK TO VISIT THE SITE.

A SWEARY
ANGRYYET ACCURATE
COMPARISON OF POLICY

VS.
CREATED BY A HUMAN BEING WHO DOESN’T BELONG TO ANY POLITICAL PARTY BUT DOES GIVE A SHIT

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 TAKEOUTS

BE RELEVANT COLLABORATE ADAPT OR DIE

NOT DEATH BY
Too often people mistake the
trappings for the substance.
COMMITTEE Everyone says that the digital
medium is a two way thing, but
Your comms should be based There’s a time for gathering few practice it. If something
on insights, not executions. information and perspectives, changes, change. If you get
Know your audience and and a time for clear decisions. momentum, be nimble enough
consider things from their Seek permission to lead and be to use it to amplify your impact.
perspective not yours or your decisive. There is more risk this Optimise and A/B test
stakeholders. Simplicity, way, but also much more constantly, and use analytics to
engagement and relevance are chance of success. You can’t test both minutiae as well as
the holy trinity of marketing. succeed and please everyone. totally different approaches.

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howtonotsuckonline.com Published under a creative commons CC BY-ND licence 2013 by www.jesserichardsoncreative.com at the www.fwd.org.au conference 2013 for the porpoises of making the internet suck less.
 TEN IN TEN

When it comes to ideation, more is more. To allow your right

brain to explore, you need to turn off your internal critic.
The trick is to force yourself to start spewing thoughts and
ideas out, even if they're terrible.
The best way I've found to do this is a technique I call 'Ten in ten' - ten ideas in ten minutes. How it works is that
you write the subject matter at the top of a page, number your page 1 to 10, then start a stopwatch. The only
rule is that you have to have ten ideas at the end of the ten minutes. Step and repeat a few times and all of a
sudden you've not only identified some great ideas, but you've developed a much deeper understanding of
your entire comms strategy - what it should and shouldn't say, what kind of messaging feels right, what kind of
mediums could work. It all starts to come together, and now you can start to allow your analytical mind to
appraise and narrow the scope, then go again on a more specific parameter e.g. ten ideas specifically utilising
Facebook as a medium. If possible, do this exercise with another person or a group.

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 UPWORTHY ARE DOING IT RIGHT

Being a big bunch of bleeding heart lefty digital people, I'm sure that you're all
no strangers to Upworthy. These guys are totes doing it right.
Clever, simple, funny, engaging, optimised, human, relevant, remarkable, etc. - they tick pretty much every box
there is to be ticked. I highly recommend checking out this slideshare presentation entitled 'How to make that
one thing go viral (just kidding)'. It’s got a lot of practical insights, but bear in mind that you don’t have to have
eleventy billion views to be successful. Everything you do to optimise and amplify your message is a success,
and the great thing about digital is that you can try shit out relatively easily. Fail fast and often, and all that.

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 WRITE MANY HEADLINES. MUCH SUCCESS. SO WOW.

Original headline Upworthy headline

CRAFT MATTERS. THIS IS WHY IT’S WORTH WRITING 25 HEADLINES.

Great ideas are actually quite common. What’s quite a lot less common are great executions with excellent craft.

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 WHAT HUMAN BEING DOESN’T WANT TO CLICK THIS?

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 A BRIEFING TEMPLATE

c r ip t io n
jec t D e s
Pro r o p
o b le m o
’s th e p r
W ha t t
c t iv e o f
th e o b je
is
Here’s a link to a briefing template you can use that will make your creative
team happy, productive, and effective.
What o st im p
is th e m
io n
A lot of people suffer the misconception that an ‘open brief’ is a good thing that will allow creative people to fully

quest
realise their potential. This is wrong. Creativity is, in essence, making new connections, and to make connections

d iff
you need to have 1. things to connect; and 2. an objective. A tightly defined, clear brief opens up creativity rather
than limiting it. This doesn’t mean bang on about crap for (p)ages, but it does mean you need to identify what it is

po in t o f
th e
you’re trying to achieve and give your creatives something to work with. Never say ‘I’ll know it when I see it’. Ever.

Wh a t ’s

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 SOME RESOURCES

u n ity ?
ort
ote: this
ro je ct (N
s p
t o ne )?
tan www.bluevertigo.com.ar www.ffffound.com www.thislife.org

nce?
This website is a meta-resource, This website has cool-looking shit all These guys are master storytellers.
it has links to pretty much every the time. Study the craft of what they do, and
useful design resource site and is enjoy some truly wonderful content.
handily categorised.

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 FINAL TAKEOUTS

TELL A STORY USE HUMOUR GIVE PEOPLE

A STRONG CALL
Many effective marketing
techniques are simply
Humour is one of the best ways
to get noticed and shared, but if
TO ACTION
appropriations of storytelling you’re going to do humour you Tell people exactly what you
devices. There’s something need to do it well. Dad jokes want them to do at the end of a
about stories that engages us aren’t really going to cut it. Do piece of communication. You
like nothing else, and they’re you know a person who makes don’t need to be pushy, but you
the ultimate ‘pull’ strategy. everyone laugh all the time? do need to be clear. We are
Check out this thing on the art Maybe you should ask that prone to distraction, especially
of storytelling from This person if they could help you online, and so a clear CTA is
American Life host Ira Glass. with your copywriting? vitally important, like so:

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 A STRONG CALL TO ACTION

If you got something out of this presentation,

would you mind sharing it?
Help to make the internet suck less by clicking here to visit the howtonotsuckonline.com site
and sharing via one of the sharey buttons down the bottom there.

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 @jesserichardson
jesserichardsoncreative.com

Believe in Destiny Yourlogicalfallacyis.com Dontbeafuckingidiot.com

Agency: Make Concept, writer, designer: Jesse Richardson Concept, writer, designer: Jesse Richardson
Client: Rarewear Front end designer: Som Meaden Programmer: James Gill
Creative director: Rem Bruijn Back end programmer: Andrew Smith
Concept, writer, designer: Jesse Richardson Rich benefactor keen to finance broader vision
of all-encompassing interactive philosophy
Art director: Bree McDonald
curriculum that will teach the next generation to
Directors: Brendan Williams & Charlie Fergusson think critically and independently, thereby
Post production: Cutting Edge Brisbane changing the course of history profoundly for
the better: TBA.
Music: Pete Jones Music

Thenounproject.com attributions: Tuxedo by Matthew Ryan Miller, Monkey by Simon Child, Chinese Takeout Box Anna Wang, Cloud by Paul Philippe Berthelon Bravo, Evolution by Michael McMillan, Book by Nathan Thomson, Pen by Michael Rowe, Seed by Marwa
Boukarim, Gavel by Ilsur Aptukov, Banana by 42, Eye by Arkthus, Newspaper by Scott Lewis, Document by Icothlon - all from The Noun Project. Rosie artwork by Caos CC for www.vector.net

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