Hamish McLachlan: New 3AW breakfast co-host Russel Howcroft opens up about life
He’ll be one of the voices waking up Melbourne, but who is 3AW’s new breakfast co-host Russel Howcroft? Hamish McLachlan spoke to him about his greatest influences, success on the Gruen show and being on the Demons board.
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Russel Howcroft has spent most of his working life in the advertising game. Then, to avoid others getting a voice, he turned his hand to being on the TV, through the Gruen Transfer. Then he was asked to help run a television network. He has written books, sat on the Melbourne Football Club board with Jim Stynes, and voted for Ten to invest into the Big Bash League when others said it would fail. Tomorrow, he becomes one half of the most successful breakfast show on radio in Melbourne.
Hamish McLachlan: You grew up in Mortlake — a great rural town. I can’t imagine anyone less suited to getting dirty on the farm than you!
Russel Howcroft: (laughs) Well, you’re probably right. The truth is I was born in Mortlake, Hamish, but I didn’t really grow up there. Very early in my life my family, mother, father, and two older sisters, moved to town and we lived in Glen Iris. Both my sisters, who are a bit older than me, they had their early years in the country, and when they were old enough to make their decisions in life, they all moved back to the country. They’ve both been in Western District ever since. They got married and moved out to the Hamilton area. I didn’t have enough of my life in the country for it to be as affecting as it was on my sisters.
HM: Your father was a stock and station agent, and began in advertising when he was 45?
RH: That’s it. He was brought up on a farm near Kerang, up near the Murray. He came down to Melbourne as a border in year 10, and when he left school he went to Melbourne University. He finished up as a stock and station agent for Elders. When I was a young boy, I can remember getting in his Ford Falcon, and we’d go on tours of country Victoria where he would go and visit all the stock and station agents. He must have been a regional manager or something I think.
HM: I love the fact that you have no idea what he did!
RH: (laughs) I was young at the time! He was ultimately a very creative man, and I’m not sure how he got the job, but he finished up at JWT (ad agency), and at 45, he was working on the National Australia Bank rural business. They had a whole group working on the rural marketing for NAB, and he was a hybrid in the agency world. He was a strategy guy, he was a creative guy, he was an account guy, and he knew the rural world very well. He had a regular cartoon — do you remember Sam the Ram, the cartoon in Stock and Land?
HM: Sure — was that your father?
RH: That was my father. Every week he had to produce a cartoon, which was basically a commentary on the rural world, via a ram.
HM: A teacher asked students to speak to their parents about their aspirations. You went home and asked your father, and he said, “I just want you to be healthy, happy and honest”. How have you gone?
RH: I believe I’m all three! The best thing that happened to me was turning 50. I got myself much healthier. I was your typical white, middle class male during my 30s and 40s, I didn’t exercise enough and indulged way too much. I’m fitter now than I’ve been for a very long time, and happy. Very happy. And honesty, well, I hope it’s a very big part of my make-up.
HM: Who in influenced you most early on?
RH: Mum and my grandfather I think. When I was growing up my mum would say ‘hello’ to everyone on the street. She smiled at everyone. I do the same, and having been on telly a bit, people do smile back at you. It’s quite nice. She’s a very sociable person, and she still walks about 5km a day — she’s 83 now! Her father, my grandfather, Ernest, did have a massive influence on me. He was a beautiful man. It’s hard to describe the impact he had on me. He was a good businessman, a good promoter, and he had a good heart. He would help the locals out a lot in Footscray. His best mate was Ron Forge, of Forges of Footscray. My grandfather was well dressed, a keen gardener, a good husband and a beautiful grandfather to all us children. He was the big influence. I was the only grandson, and his son, who was the father of three daughters, had died of bowel cancer when I was very young. I was the only boy in our family, so I do feel like there was a lot of concentrated effort put into me, by him.
HM: The hardest period I understand for you was when your parents divorced. How did that shape you?
RH: That was a big deal for me. My mother and father separated, and ultimately, they were divorced. I lived with dad, and he remarried a wonderful woman called Elizabeth, which was the same name as my mother! We call her Elizabeth II. Elizabeth II and her beautiful family had a very positive impact on my father and myself. That time in my life certainly affected how I have approached my marriage. Kate and I have been married 28 years and counting. My father died more than 20 years ago. We all still think of him every day. And my mother lives just down the road. Kate and I talk to mum every day if we don’t see her. She has a whisky at 6pm every night. A WhatsApp whisky has become quite regular!
HM: How does she hold out so late in the day!
RH: She’s well managed! And very disciplined.
HM: How did you end up in advertising?
RH: My dad was in it. I was given a week’s work experience at McCann Erickson. I was still studying. I was doing a marketing degree, and at the end of the week they said, “Would you like to stay?” I stayed because I loved it and couldn’t think of anything else I’d rather do.
HM: You ended up in London in your early 20s with the agency Lowe Howard-Spink?
RH: Kate and I travelled around Europe in our early 20s.
HM: Were you married at that point?
RH: No, just boyfriend and girlfriend. At the end of our travels I stayed to get a job and Kate went home. I had an interview at a place called Lowe Howard-Spink. As a naive, ignorant young Aussie I’d never heard of them! I was offered a job as the account manager on Heineken. It turned out Lowe Howard-Spink was considered one of the best agencies in the world, and the Heineken account was the best account in London to work on. I was so lucky! That started the most exciting period working at genuinely one of the very best agencies in the world, connecting with the best creative people, strategic people, and incredible clients that wanted great advertising produced for them.
HM: You came back to Melbourne, but were almost lured back to London for a long period?
RH: My father rang me to tell me that he was ill — he had cancer. I came home and started working at a great agency called George Patterson. Kate and I had just got married, and Kate was pregnant and we just settled down. When my father died, a few years later, I received a letter in the mail with a ticket to London inside. A former employer at Lowe Howard-Spink had sent me a plane ticket to London. “We’re sad to hear about your father dying, and we’d love to see you”.
HM: Did you head over?
RH: I jumped on the plane, without really knowing what was going to happen, and when I arrived, they took me out to lunch, and handed me a contract to be a part of the management team at Lowe Howard-Spink and help run one of the best agencies in the world. I returned to Melbourne to make a decision. Kate and I had young kids, we’d just bought a house, I wanted to see the Demons play, so staying in Melbourne won the day over London. Sliding doors!
HM: You started your own agency — Leonardi Brandhouse.
RH: That was when advertising was a lot easier! You would win business by showing clients your work. You would literally put a VHS into a recorder, press play, and show clients the ads that you’d made! That was always a joy for me in the ad game. That’s because of the London experience more than anything, because that was all about doing very high production, expensive, long-form ads that made a big impact. Once that was in your blood, it was hard to not want to do that all the time.
HM: What’s the best ad campaign, or brand development, that you’ve ever seen? Either from scratch, to globally-known, or from disastrous, on its knees, back to the top?
RH: The Stella Artois case study from that 90s period is actually a great case study. If you jump on YouTube and type in Stella Artois UK advertising, you’ll see a series of ads which are stunning. They took a beer — which was essentially the same beer as it had always been, and not much different to most others — and positioned it in a different world.
HM: And recently?
RH: Most recently Snoop Dogg and Menulog I’ve loved. It’s an unbelievable piece of advertising because of the high production values and the jingle you remember. It gets your attention, you like watching it, and you remember the product.
HM: I find the Frank Walker National Tiles campaign an interesting one. If I think of tiles, I think of …
RH: Frank. That is a case study in relentless consistency! This is something which advertisers can forget. It’s about always being in your face, or in that case, in your ears. It’s just through being relentless that, when you’re thinking tiles, you’re thinking Frank Walker. If he advertised that same piece of advertising, but he did it in one tenth of the time, then it would have nowhere near the effect. That campaign is more about frequency.
HM: You’re a Melbourne Demons man. What year were you born?
RH: I was born in 1965 … a year after their last flag and I haven’t seen what I pray I do!
The Norm Smith curse, right? A couple of important things happened in ’65. Norm Smith was sacked and then reinstated, and Richmond was allowed to play at the MCG. We’ve given up a competitive advantage. The Norm Smith sacking reverberated amongst the club. It’s one of the storylines around the Melbourne Football Club. You can’t blame my parents, or my cousins.
HM: You arrive in 1965, things turn south for the club almost immediately, and the late great Jim Stynes still asked you to join the board!
RH: (laughs) What a great day that was!
HM: How did that happen?
RH: The short version of the story is Don McLardy was ringing up my office. I kept saying I’d call him back, but I didn’t. I didn’t know that Don was gathering resources for Jim. Jim Stynes rang the office a few days later, and of course, I picked up the phone. Jim was a hero of mine. He came to see me at the George Patterson offices, and in his Irish accent he said, “I’d like you to join the board, but if you can’t join my board, then I want you to tell me someone who’s better at doing what you do than you are”.
HM: Clever — worked to your ego!
RH: Very clever. My wife found out that I was on the board when she read it in the paper a couple of days later.
HM: Didn’t think you’d tell Kate?
RH: (laughs) I didn’t think I’d tell her. At that point, Kate and my relationship didn’t really revolve around football. It was the best thing that ever happened, joining the board of the football club, because Kate became engaged in footy, and she’s never looked back. I knew that the game had her, when I got into her car one day, turned it on, and it was on SEN! “I see you’re listening to SEN”… her response was “Oh, yeah, I love KB”. To this day, she’s a very passionate Melbourne supporter.
HM: You were at Melbourne in some horrifically dark times. What did you learn through it all, either about the club, yourself, individuals, management, faults, failings?
RH: I learnt a lot about the importance of leadership, no question. Jim genuinely was an incredible leader. People would rally around him, he could focus people in a particular direction, and stuff would happen. Of course, when the leader becomes ill, and when the leader is lost, that does create a very difficult environment. A genuine void is created. Jim left a void. Could we have managed it better? In hindsight, yes, probably, but I’m not so sure that any decision would have been made differently. In reality, you’ve got Jim Stynes, he is much loved, he’s dying of cancer, you want to do all you can to support him, and you believe that through supporting him you’re supporting the club.
HM: What about when the club is getting mauled by 100 points week in, week out. How does that affect you as a board member in your broader life?
RH: It’s really tough. It affects you, for sure, and that means it affects your family. My emotional focus was always about players. A football club has to do its very best to give the players every chance they can possibly have of winning, and of winning a premiership. Not every AFL player ultimately wins a premiership, and every AFL player knows that that’s the case, but you’ve got to be in an environment that feels like it’s got a chance. I always felt for the players. You would watch them after a game and just think how tough it must be on them physically of course, but also mentally. They found it hard to walk about, go into coffee shops — a lot of players found that period really dark. Even now, reflecting on it, I’m saddened about it. And, I am sad I am no longer on the board of the MFC. But I do get a pretty powerful MCG fix through being on the MCC committee.
HM: The club looks to be in a much better spot now than it has been for a long time.
RH: I think they’re on their way. I said to Mike Sheehan a couple of years ago, “Mike, how many players do you need in your Top 50 in order to win?” He said, “You need a minimum four, but five would be better”. If we go through it, Max Gawn, Petracca, Clayton Oliver, Jack Viney … we are getting closer.
HM: What’s your lasting impression of Jimmy Stynes?
RH: Desperate to give back, in every facet of his life. Desperate to give back to the city that gave him an incredible life, desperate to give back to society, desperate to give back to the Melbourne Football Club, desperate to give back to supporters, members, and his friends.
HM: Nice way to be remembered. How did you get lured over to be GM of Channel 10?
RH: James Warburton rang me up and said, “We’re thinking about doing a Sunday Project, and we’re thinking about you”. I met with Lachlan Murdoch, and then James sent me a contract. “Don’t do Project — come and run Melbourne, be the GM of the Network”. “Ahh …OK then!”. I left the ad game and started at Network 10. I had a sensational time at Channel 10, in particular, with the Big Bash. That was an amazing acquisition, and then we set about turning that into a pretty successful show.
HM: Who made the decision to buy the Big Bash?
RH: Hamish McLennan was in the seat as the CEO, and I was part of the team. We paid $100 million for the BBL for five years.
HM: Did you think you’d paid too much at the time?
RH: We hoped not! It paid itself off by the time we got to the end of the five years. It was very, very exciting when the first game was played. 500,000 tuned in, and we were expecting closer to 300,000! It just took off! We were getting a million viewers by the end. To be part of the creation of something like that was incredibly exciting.
HM: The future of television is uncertain. What do you think happens to free to air given the proliferation of competition?
RH: Free to air has to concentrate on what it’s good at. Live sport, reality TV, news. The thing that we mustn’t forget about free to air television is it’s just that — free. Not all of us have got the money to be able to have our Foxtel, or Kayo, our Stan, Netflix, Amazon. It plays a really important mass media role, and it’s really important for mass marketers. When you’re watching your Channel 7 footy, Bunnings Warehouse and KFC, for example, rely on the mass audience of free to air television to help them with their business. It’s really critical that we have a thriving free to air market.
HM: Fingers crossed. What is the Gruen Transfer, by definition?
RH: There was a man called Victor Gruen, who was an architect in the early part of the last century in the US. He designed shopping malls, and he designed them in order to turn the browser, into a buyer. We’re all used to it now, as we go through shops, and malls. We are architecturally directed in a particular way. That turns us from a browser, into a buyer. He designed that, and that became known as the ‘Gruen Transfer’.
HM: You’d spent a life putting ads on TV, and then somehow, you were on TV. How did you end up on Gruen?
RH: I got a phone call from a fellow called John Casimer, who was working with Andrew Denton. Gruen is owned by Andrew. They said, “We’d like you to come and do a screen test”. Long story short, I said yes because I thought, “If I’m not sitting there, one of my competitors will be, and I don’t want that!”. I was CEO of George Patterson, and I didn’t want the CEO of another agency in the seat. Three years down the track I wasn’t doing it for competitive reasons, I was doing it because I really enjoyed it. I love the medium.
HM: Did the Gruen Transfer’s success blow everyone away?
RH: It was the most successful launch on the ABC since Kath & Kim. For 11 years, it’s been the number one show on the ABC every year. Three of the top five shows ever on the ABC are Gruen shows! Who would have thought!
HM: You’re an author too?
RH: I love to write. I’ve written two books — one is When It’s Right to be Wrong. It’s just about being in the business of ideas, and it’s fine to be wrong, but really important to have them! With a mate I’ve done a book called The Right Brain Workout. That’s just a series of creative exercises. We did that last Christmas, and after two weeks it went into reprint. We’re doing The Right Brain Workout 2 for this coming Christmas. It’s really good fun. That’s around energising people’s creativity. As I’m sure you’re aware, creativity gets taught out of us. You’ll see it happen to your young children. Unbelievably creative at five, less so at 15, until school teaches it out of us.
HM: What would you change?
RH: Creativity needs to become a core part of our curriculum. In China, they’ve already done it. It’s arts in its broad context. It’s collaboration, co-operation, creativity, in all its forms. It needs to be a core part of our curriculum. My daughter said to me when she was in year 9, “Dad, why do we all have to do maths and English, but we don’t all have to do art?” That’s a pretty good question. As we move into the fourth industrial revolution the world is all about machine learning, artificial intelligence. Humanities and creativity will be the difference. Without our creativity, the machines are going to do a lot of everything. That’s a bit of a hobby horse of mine, Hamish.
HM: Chairman of the Australian Film School.
RH: It’s an exciting thing to be involved in. AFTRS is a part-federally-funded film, television and radio school in Sydney. It’s an amazing place where graduates leave AFTRS to become filmmakers, film producers, radio producers, writers. It’s everything that happens behind the camera. A great joy for me.
HM: Have you always loved radio?
RH: Yes. Being a hardcore Melbourne VFL man, growing up was all about listening to the footy on the radio. The radio could take you places — it can transport you. The sounds of the ball and the bat, they were the sounds of my summers, and the calls of the football the soundtrack of my winters.
HM: When 3AW came calling to partner with Ross Stevenson, how difficult a decision was it?
RH: It was hugely flattering as I’m a big Ross and John fan. But then it became complicated when I began to think it through. It meant giving up a job I love at PWC, convincing my wife that not seeing her in the mornings would be a good thing, and bed at around 9pm Sunday to Thursday would be a fun change for us all! Then there was the decision around, ‘Do I want to be the guy who follows a legend like John Burns!” They are big shoes, and the role comes with pressure, and you know you will be critiqued and compared. But after a few months, I just couldn’t say no. It is a job I have dreamt about. And I am really looking forward to it.
HM: How are you approaching it? You are the new boy, across the desk from a legend of the caper that has been doing it for a while.
RH: That’s something I have been asking a lot of people. I was told the other day by someone who has worked with Ross, and understands this stuff pretty well … “Don’t feel like you need to impose yourself … let Ross play his game and let him lead you around the dance floor, he won’t let you fall!’ I think that’s the play — hopefully in time we will find a nice rhythm together.
HM: Ross and John … Ross and Russel? Ross and Rusty?
RH: God Russel is a bad name isn’t it! It can’t be Ross and Russel — I don’t particularly like the name Russel, and I know Ross doesn’t! Ross and Russ, Ross and Rusty, maybe — people call me Rusty and I prefer it to Russel. I’m not sure, I just hope people like listening to us!
HM: I’m sure many will — set your alarm nice and early, don’t be late!
RH: It’s set. I’m looking forward to it — I’ll be like first day at school!