Rosso: I’m glad I don’t have to share my personal life to build my brand any more
Comedian Tim “Rosso” Ross has spoken of the freedom of no longer being obliged to share everything about his life as he did when presenting on a breakfast radio show.
Tom Lowndes, Tim Ross, Em Rusciano,Christian Van Vuuren
Ross, speaking at the Mumbrella Entertainment Marketing Summit, said: “I did years of breakfast radio where you have to throw everyone under the bus in your life, whether it was neighbours or whatever shit you talk about, suddenly you just need to find all this content. You put everything on the line and now I don’t have to do that, it’s not part of my life.”
Ross, who now works as a standup comedian and pursues his passion for modernist architecture, said: “I don’t feel I have to but I like people who do,” he said. “I share in different ways.”
Speaking on a panel about building a personal brand, Ross said radio was “shit” at marketing. “I don’t think the system I had was any good, radio stations doing marketing, they’re all shit at it,” he said to laughter.
They’re good at certain things. Your content creates your brand in radio. They try, we’ve all seen the billboards.,” he said.
When Merrick [Watts] and I first started, we built a brand by getting out in front of people, we built a following, we did it the old school way.”
Em Rusciano, comedian and writer, said social media is her “first port of call”, admitting that she decided to start targeting mums on social media at the times of day she herself was using the medium.
“I became a student of Facebook analytics, I had a lot of time on my hands. I decided I was going to go niche to go big so I went after mums,” she said.
“I went after women who were my age and tried to be someone I wasn’t seeing out there. There was a lot of women posting children who were perfect and their house looked designer and in reality I was sitting at home eating Weetbix for dinner and wearing bathers as undies. I felt like there must be other women out there like that.
“I started telling the truth at the times of the day that I was online which was dropping the kids off at school, picking them up and just when they’ve gone to bed. That was the three main times I was noticing peaks in my traffic, so I started targeting those times of days with posts around those times of day.”
While Ross prefers not to share too much of himself, although he has built a large following of design fans on Instagram, it is is not a concern for Rusciano.
“I don’t plan any of my posts, it tends to happen when I’ve had a bottle of wine and I live to regret it the next day,” she quipped. It’s important to share when things are shit because it makes when things are good even sweeter and better.”
Referencing her decision to resign from News Corp after a story about her participation in Seven’s The Big Music Quiz left her crying under her desk at her Hit Network radio job, Rusciano said: “That was a really shit day. I quit my job at News.com.au two weeks before my book and stand up tour and my manager tried to talk me out of it very severely and I just said to tell them to go fuck themselves. He said you realise that’s Murdoch and I said I don’t care.”
“I don’t worry about sharing too much of myself, there’s less to remember if you tell the truth and people gravitate to it, I don’t try or plan it, I kind of spew it and regret it later and move on.”
For Christiaan Van Vuuren, one half of the Bondi Hipsters and the creator of Soul Mates, creating a personal brand was about getting his work seen.
Van Vuuren started his career on YouTube with videos around his character Fully Sick Rapper.
“I was a little bit keen to not get too glued to that for a long period of time so Bondi Hipsters was just an idea from when I spent a lot of time in Bondi and hearing conversations in Bondi,” he said.
“We thought with Bondi Hipsters it was a fun and easy thing to shoot. At this point in time Bondi Hipsters was a partnership with a guy called Nick Boshier, who made Trent from Punchy and the Beached As cartoons.
“We thought with Bondi Hipsters we could put some strategy into this, we aimed to shoot a new video every week for a year, that was the goal. We did 47 weeks in a row and through that process of creating we came to understand the characters, understand their world, work out what was funny, what wasn’t, made a few things we weren’t particularly proud of, made a bunch of other things we were particularly proud of.
“The idea was to always build these characters and this world with the intention of moving it to television or into film.”
- The second part of Ross’ documentary on Australian architecture Streets of Your Town airs on ABC this Tuesday 15 Nov at 8:30pm
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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