‘He basically said that he hates marketing’: How Robbie Brammall landed the MONA gig with David Walsh
When Robbie Brammall sat down with billionaire and the owner of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) David Walsh about taking on the head marketing role almost a decade ago, he couldn’t have prepared for the conversation they had. Here’s what happened.
Appearing on a new episode of Mumbrella’s one-on-one podcast series, Brammall – who announced his departure from MONA last month after eight years – discussed meeting Walsh for the first time in Salamanca in Tasmania about becoming the director of marketing and communications.
“He basically said that he hates marketing,” Brammall recalled to host Neil Griffiths.
“‘It’s the worst job in MONA, marketing’s a snake eating its own tail.’ He said, ‘But you’re going pretty well, that’s why you’re in the interview.’
“He just gave me one bit of advice. He said ‘Fail if you have to, upset people if you can, just don’t drift to the middle.’ So that’s his encapsulation of what he wants, what he wanted from the MONA brand.”
Brammall explained that understanding that motto was critical to his relationship with Walsh and taking on the gig – knowing what the “clear vision” for the brand was.
“… That framed up the way that I would operate as the director of marketing comms there,” he said.
Highlights of Brammall’s time at MONA include launching an airline and giving all the seats away to Pentecostal Christians from Wollongong, inventing a beer-roulette vending machine that sporadically paid out with warm Fosters, and generating zero complaints for a festival by floating the complaints box 100m off the museum.
He was also responsible for memorialising Tasmania’s last three Video City employees on cans of similarly rare beer, sneaking a Torana into a pool in Bondi, creating a billboard that direct-dialled The Whitehouse, re-building Mona’s website with mostly in-jokes, and making a virtue out of MONA’s most unhinged one-star reviews that name-checked everything from yodelling and exotic cuttlefish to asthma attacks.
In the new episode, Brammall also talks about the successes and failures of his time at MONA and what his future looks like.
Listen to the full chat here.
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Neil Griffiths is the Managing Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the company in October 2023.
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