Jack Tossol
ARTICLE — Alice Armitage
It’s safe to assume that even if Jack Tossol’s name is not familiar to you, you’ll have seen his videos before. While he now lives in the big smoke, he’s just a country kid from the small town of Thornton in northeast Victoria having a go. Jack’s made quite the name for himself across social media over the last five years, with much of his content focused on the humor of country culture. We sat down with Jack to get a little peek behind the curtain as part of a new series, interviewing regional influencers about their work, lives and what drives them to create content about the country.
Do you have a real job?
I do, very different and not at all creative but I work in wealth management. I’m just another concrete cowboy in the big smoke most of the time.
You’ve built quite the following and developed a very particular style of content, how did this all come about?
Jeez, it has to be almost five years. The typical COVID TikTok blow up. Initially it wasn’t that serious, when we were all working from home I got out of the city. Thinking it would be for a week or so and lo and behold it ended up being months. I started making a couple of videos to get some laughs out of my mates.
I think the first one was me mimicking Carl Barron, it got 600 views. Jesus, I didn’t even know 600 people. To me then, it was off the charts. I kept going, really leaning into the dry bush humour. Country people in general are just such an eccentric bunch. You can go to any rural pub and sit down at the front bar and have a beer, you look around and think to yourself ‘how do these people exist’. The level of character is just world class. The stories you hear, even as a fly on the wall, are off the charts. I guess that’s where I get a lot of my ideas from – spending time in pubs with other ratbags.
When I first hit 100,000 views on a video all I could think of was ‘that’s a whole MCG full of people’ it was unbelievable.
So what you’re telling me is initially it was all a bit of fun. When did you realise that maybe it was going to turn into something?
It’s hard to say, there wasn’t one big defining moment. It’s all a gradual progression. Ten thousand followers felt big, fifty thousand followers felt big.
There is a lot of money in the social media world, but it’s not a linear journey. You might not see much for a couple of years while you’re getting established. Then you hit a point of terminal momentum and it feels like you just go through the roof. The money is good now, but it isn’t and has never been primarily about that. It’s a creative outlet, it’s good to get a few laughs and I find it fun. I guess financial success feels like cream on top. How the bloody hell did I get from that first video, mimicking Carl Barron to where I am now?!
Surely there are some things you’ve done that you feel have really contributed to that success?
Like anything in life, trial and error is most of it. You’re never going to nail every single video and the majority of the time you just analyse what worked and what didn’t work.
Sometimes the best way to get engagement is to either intentionally say something wrong or say something inflammatory. I think deep down everyone wants to get offended, right? They’re looking for a reason to act up, so maybe it’s just giving people what they want. If you know where that line is, you’ve got to step over it a little, walk that precarious tightrope.
Are you ever concerned about the uncertain future of social media? Everything that happened with TikTok earlier in the year in the States certainly rattled a few people.
I’d say no. I wouldn’t say I’m old – I’m thirty now – but I’m older than a lot of people who have a shared success on the internet. Most of them have never worked a day job in their lives and if TikTok and Instagram got swept away, they’d base their whole value in life against how many followers they had. They’ve got a lot less transferable skills than I do.
I’m going to make the most of it while I can but if I say something that gets me cancelled, or TikTok gets banned tomorrow, I’m still going to be doing the same thing. Hanging out with the same degenerates, at the same pub, doing the same stuff.
You can lose your followers on any of the platforms but at the end of the day, people backed my personality and what I can do. No one can take away five years’ creative and comedic expansion, so I’d take that and move onto something new.
You talk about those transferable skills, but you’ve also built so many relationships as well. One could argue they’re equally as valuable.
Generally in life, your biggest asset is your personal network. I would say that ninety-nine percent of the chances you get are a result of the connections you’ve got, right? You can be bitter about life and say, I wasn’t born into the right connections, saying you don’t know this person or have this opportunity. But you just have to get out there and make some.
Any final wisdom you’d like to impart?
I don’t know, at the end of the day I’m just a boy from the bush having a crack, from a small town of 150 people, just trying to get by.
