🤩 Scaling Service x Mark Rofe: less bylines, more billboards
Draw me like one of your French girls, and send me a brief while you're at it
Scaling Service is a newsletter from The Family. We interview founders in the PR sector and ask them about everything from funding to sales to exits.
This month we’ve got Mark Rofe, founder of DigitalPRCourse.com, on how he built his personal brand.
How should you build your professional profile?
You could, if you wanted to be sensible about it, think about podcasts or webinars. You could start writing, picking up bylines here and there.
You might even start a newsletter! Everybody loves a newsletter.
Or you could get a billboard. You could put up a picture of yourself in sunglasses, in full Draw Me Like One Of Your French Girls pose, with "Single?" written above you in Comic Sans. You could launch a one-person dating site to go along with it. And you could quickly find yourself on every news site in the UK and quite a few beyond.
That's what Mark Rofe did, a couple of years ago.
It was never an intentional profile play, he says. But there’s no doubt that it’s led to him standing out in what is, when it comes to personal branding, a very crowded industry.
Before we dig into the nitty gritty of the engagement, though, we want to address the most important question: did it work?
"I had to stop replies after a couple of thousand, because it was getting beyond ridiculous," he says. "I did date three people from it. It was a little bit unfortunate in terms of the timing - I did it six or seven weeks before the pandemic kicked in, before lockdowns. And I did meet someone. It didn't last, but I don't think that was because of the billboard."
Like so many other great ideas, "it started out in a pub, just as a bit of a joke. I was chatting to my friend and he egged me on, and I thought that if we made this funny then it could be really good." Or, to be more precise, the opposite: so bad that it became good again.
"I was hoping to make it look terrible, with the pose and the font. That wasn't even my idea - I think I had Arial originally - but a friend told me that if I wanted to do it properly, if I wanted to make it really, really bad, I needed to go Comic Sans. And she was right."
This opened Mark's eyes to the power of getting things 'wrong'. "A lot of the comments were asking 'Why is he using Comic Sans?' That kind of engagement helps, especially on social media. If you've made even just a little bit of an error, whether it's saying something wrong or a spelling mistake, that actually makes it go even further."
In this case, it went all the way to prime-time television, both in the UK and across the Atlantic.
"It was on Jimmy Fallon's show, Ellen's show, Kelly Clarkson's - I didn't even know she had a show! BBC News, journalists from around the world. I was asked to go on This Morning and Good Morning Britain, although they made me choose between them - apparently you can only go on one. I chose This Morning and turned Piers Morgan down. It was very overwhelming."
Hot on the heels of the media coverage came the invitations and opportunities. "A couple of TV companies wanted to take me away to meet somebody in another country. Another wanted to film all my dates. There was an idea for a dating show where I'd design billboards for other people. Britain's Got Talent got in touch!"
Though it doesn't always go to plan. You may remember Mark being photographed at an England game with three Lion Bar wrappers stuck a to a plain white t-shirt.
"I didn't get any free chocolate."
Mark is at ease with the fact that, for many people, he is The Billboard Guy.
"In terms of my personal brand, I think that's something that people are always going to associate with me. It's what people in the industry may know me for.
“It's interesting - all I really did was put up a billboard, which anyone can do, but people think I'm good at marketing because I did it."
And being The Billboard Guy has been quite helpful, from a professional point of view. "It opened the floodgates a little bit. Some people wanted to work with us at Rise at Seven because of it, and we were able to use it in pitches as well - we had a couple of people in our team who'd gone viral and we were able to use that as our credentials."
Mark is now teaching courses on digital PR, and it helps him avoid the old cliche about those who can and those who can't. "With my courses, you can see that I've done it - I'm not just teaching without any substance behind it."
But it's important not to be just The Billboard Guy. "I've had to be careful. People were saying to me 'Yeah, Mark's good at doing this kind of stuff… for himself. But can he do it for clients, or something more commercial?' And I've had to prove that I was able to do that: to drive something with more commercial intent, like my Christmas tree website."
Obviously, putting yourself up on a billboard takes a certain amount of self-confidence. But that doesn't mean that Mark didn't have doubts.
"I'd never bought a billboard, but it actually takes some time before it appears. So very quickly I had this overwhelming dread: oh my god, what have I done, I'm going to look such an idiot."
So when we ask if Mark has any advice for anybody considering making a literal spectacle of themselves, he offers reassurance.
"If you do something, and it doesn't go well, people often forget about it. You think the spotlight is more on you than it actually is.
“The sunglasses kept me somewhat anonymous, and I did the billboard in Manchester while I was living in Sheffield. Partly because it was a bigger city, and partly just in case it backfired. But most people simply aren't going to remember. Unless you do something really terrible."