Scott Dikkers
Most large organisations have plenty of process for filtering ideas and very little for producing them. As generative tools commoditise first drafts, the scarce resource is the ability to write, edit and ship original material that is recognisably the brand’s own. Creative output at volume has become a competitive variable that few leadership teams know how to manage.
Scott Dikkers is the founder of The Onion and a New York Times number one bestselling author who helps organisations treat creativity, brand voice and humour as a repeatable operating discipline.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Scott Dikkers
- A published method for generating creative output at volume, codified in the “How to Write Funny” series and tested over three decades of running The Onion newsroom.
- The founder’s view of how a $16,000 college newspaper became a national satirical brand worth multiples of that, with a defined argument about mission, culture and creative discipline drawn from “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.”
- Built and runs the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City in Chicago, training comedy writers who have gone on to Emmy-winning television rooms, so the keynote sits on top of a working teaching practice.
- A practitioner’s perspective on creativity in the age of generative AI, framed around how human writers and editors keep brand voice intact when first drafts are cheap and originality is not.
Biography highlights
- Founder of The Onion and TheOnion.com, the world’s first humour website.
- Longest-serving editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures (1988-1999 and 2005-2008) and former General Manager and VP of Creative Development.
- Number one New York Times bestselling author of “Our Dumb Century,” winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
- Author of more than 30 books, including the “How to Write Funny” series, “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.”
- Creator of the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City training centre in Chicago.
- Syndicated cartoonist of “Jim’s Journal,” distributed to college newspapers across the United States from 1987 to 1997.
Biography
A satirical college newspaper bought for $16,000 in 1989 became one of the most recognisable brands in American media. The route from there to a national audience, a Peabody-winning news network and a publishing list that has sold millions of copies was not luck. It was a writers’ room run with unusual discipline, and Scott Dikkers ran it for most of its formative years.
As editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures, and later as General Manager and VP of Creative Development, Dikkers built the editorial process that produced the headlines most readers can still quote. He launched TheOnion.com in 1996, the first humour website on the internet, and went on to edit “Our Dumb Century,” a number one New York Times bestseller that won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and has sold more than half a million copies.
The argument behind his commercial work is set out in “How to Write Funny,” “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Comedy is not magic. It is a method, and brand voice is the operational output of that method. Dikkers codified the process at The Onion, then transferred it into the “Writing with The Onion” programme he created at The Second City training centre in Chicago, where his students have been hired into Emmy-winning television rooms.
For corporate audiences, the relevance is direct. Generative AI has made first drafts trivial and originality scarce. Dikkers’ keynote takes the writers’ room discipline that built The Onion and applies it to creative output, brand voice and the question every marketing and product team is now asking: how do you keep what makes your work yours when the cost of imitation has collapsed.
Key speaking topics
- Creativity as an operating discipline
- Brand voice and editorial culture
- Humour and storytelling in business communication
- Building a media brand from a standing start
- Creative leadership in the age of generative AI
- Media literacy and the reading of satire
- Mission-led culture in creative organisations
Ideal for
- CMOs, brand and content leaders managing creative output at scale
- Innovation, R&D and product leadership teams working alongside generative AI tools
- Communications, internal comms and L&D leaders rebuilding storytelling capability
- Entrepreneurship programmes and founder audiences at universities and conferences
Audience outcomes
- A working method for generating original creative material, drawn from the writers’ room that built The Onion
- A clearer language for what brand voice is and how it survives contact with AI-generated content
- A founder’s view of how a small editorial team scaled into a national media business without losing its identity
- A sharper test for distinguishing satire and credible information in a feed-driven media environment
- A reference set of named examples from three decades of Onion headlines that a team can take back into its own creative reviews
Talks
A keynote on human creativity as the operating advantage that survives generative AI, drawn from the method that built The Onion into a multi-million-dollar brand.
Key takeaways:
- Why originality, not productivity, is the scarce variable once first drafts are free
- A repeatable process for generating and editing creative output at volume
- How creative teams should reorganise around AI tools rather than against them
A culture and leadership keynote built on the three principles Dikkers used to grow The Onion from a college paper into a national media brand.
Key takeaways:
- How mission-led editorial decisions compound into a recognisable brand
- The “Love Economy” inside a creative organisation and what it produces commercially
- Why fun is an operational variable, not a perk, in sustaining a writers’ room
A media literacy keynote on how to read, verify and share information in an environment where satire, opinion and news share the same feed.
Key takeaways:
- The structural cues that separate satire from misinformation
- A practical approach to source verification for non-journalists
- The responsibilities of organisations whose people are publishing into the same feed
An autobiographical keynote on building The Onion from a $16,000 acquisition, written for entrepreneurship and student audiences.
Key takeaways:
- How a small editorial team scaled a brand without venture-style capital
- The decisions that made The Onion durable through repeated ownership changes
- What a founder’s path through a creative business looks like in practice