The cease and desist letter arrived just a few months after she’d started her business.   

“When that email came through, I was like, it’s all over,” recalls Cherie Clonan. 

Her Melbourne-based digital marketing agency had launched as The Social Playground – a name she was assured, by her registered intellectual property (IP) lawyer at the time, was ironclad. 

“We were told it was safe because it had ‘The’ before the next two words and that was enough, apparently, to differentiate,” says Cherie. “It’s absolutely not. So we got cease-and-desisted very quickly.”  

A cease and desist letter is a warning from a lawyer or individual, threatening legal action if the activity – in this case, trading with a particular name – continues. Cherie’s one came from Social Playground, a Sydney-based advertising agency. 

“And honestly, fair enough, on behalf of that business,” says Cherie. “We saved all our pennies for our little first ever-investment [in IP] but it didn’t quite check out. Lessons were learned.”

Swiftly, Cherie changed her business name to one that has stuck firm for more than a decade. Today, she’s the CEO of The Digital Picnic.

“I love our name,” says Cherie. “It’s so future-proof, in that ‘The Digital Picnic’ can go in so many ways. It’s protected us from how much the industry has changed in the 11 years I’ve been in it. So that cease and desist was a blessing in disguise.

“But at that moment, when I read that email, my heart stopped and my hands started to shake. I don’t feel like I’m on planet Earth to screw people over, so to think that I had made another business feel like I was copying them, in any way, made me feel absolutely awful.” 

As any of the tens of thousands of people who Cherie has helped make sense of the digital landscape will tell you, her approach is one-hundred-percent original.  

Fresh out of high school, she dropped out of a law degree (“obviously – not a lot stuck!”) and returned to study in the digital marketing field – but found her university curriculums hadn’t kept pace with this fast-evolving space. 

“I thought, surely there has to be something better,” she says. “I promised myself that, when I clocked enough experience in the industry, I would roll out a teaching opportunity for folks who want to brush up their skills in digital. So that’s how we started.”

“I wish more people would back themselves and build their own stories and their own IP.”

Launched in 2014, The Digital Picnic has educated more than 25,000 people through its suite of online courses and in-person workshops. Known as “the nicest place on the internet”, this training agency brings colourful, cool-nerd solutions to the challenges faced by modern marketers. And it does so in a very distinct style. 

“Pretty early on I realised I have this advantage – I have a really unique way of teaching people,” says Cherie. “I’m an Autistic woman, so my brain thinks really differently.”

Sure, she can wine and dine with the marketing teams at Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn like every other agency in Australia. But she also buddies up with their engineering departments – and gets across their highly mathematical frameworks.    

“Then I’m like, how can I break this down for the legendary mere mortals that I get to meet on a day-to-day basis – who don’t want fluency in algorithms that are only going to change next week,” says Cherie.  

“What we’re doing is successful because of our ability to explain things in the unique way that we do. So I knew straight away – I have to protect this. This is like protecting my brain. And I want [The Digital Picnic] to look, feel and sound like me so much so that when it gets copied, people can say, ‘oh, that’s a Cherie-ism’.”  

In this, she has very much succeeded. 

Cherie is often sent screen grabs of social media posts by businesses that have attempted to adopt her writing style and brand voice. She’s also been made aware of people who’ve trained in The Digital Picnic courses and then endeavoured to roll them out, word for word, under their own name. 

“Ultimately, it always comes back to us – and you just can’t quite believe the audacity of people, you know? I wish more people would back themselves and build their own stories and their own IP.”

The Digital Picnic team and founder Cherie.

On a few occasions, The Digital Picnic has delivered its own cease and desist letters to certain individuals. “Folks who are copying our curriculum, basically, and then trying to teach it,” Cherie explains. 

So far, all of these letters have had the desired effect – except for one.

“And I thought, all right, I’ll let you try and do this because if you’re robbing from someone else’s teachings, I can’t see how that’s going to end well. And I’ve been following quietly and, spoiler alert, it hasn’t.” 

After her initial IP stumble, Cherie found gold-star representation in the form of their first client from the legal sector. “We got better recommendations and protected as much as we possibly can,” she says. “It’s all an investment, but it’s so worth it.” 

There are now many lawyers in The Digital Picnic’s portfolio, all on-hand to offer professional guidance. 

“We have almost like a little black book of people we can lean on for reciprocal support,” says Cherie. “So it feels good, it feels safe.” 

“Consider this your permission to take up space.” 

Cherie also feels secure in the strength of the brand she’s built. And as AI-generated content floods her industry, she sees all the more opportunity to differentiate. 

“You’ve never had an invitation to be more you than in this climate,” she says. 

“We’re big AI adopters in so many ways, but I’ve never craved more ‘human’ than right now. Because I only have to scroll LinkedIn to lose count of how much content I’ve read that, from start to finish, is written by ChatGPT.  

“So maybe the best safeguard these days is to just go all in on that brand-building experience. For our clients and for The Digital Picnic, I want folks to be able to tell the difference between the knockoff and the real thing.”  

Along with her call to hero human-crafted content, Cherie advises new founders to consider their IP with the future in mind. 

“Where do you see yourself, 10 to 15 years from now?” she asks. 

“I encourage people to take the early-day experiences a lot more seriously. We’ve taken our IP really seriously – from the first three months in business – because I wanted to be optimistic about where this might end up.  

“I’m finding that women and gender diverse folks do a lot more of that impostering in the early days. So consider this your permission to take up space.”