AUSTIN, Texas—Law school may teach students the discipline of time management and commitment to reading hundreds of hours of cases, looking for the smallest of details to help illuminate the most valuable takeaway. But one thing it doesn’t do is help law students understand the importance of branding themselves as a reputable legal professional.
Andrew Rossow, an adjunct law professor teaches Internet Law to 2L and 3L students at The University of Dayton School of Law, his alma mater. He also just launched AR Media, a media consulting agency in Austin, Texas that specifically focuses on Gen-Z and young entrepreneurs looking to create and/or nurture their personal brands.
Rossow, 31, has his own unique tale of entrepreneurial success that he describes as a “complete accident” that resulted from a very toxic relationship. “Graduating law school, I was very fortunate and blessed that I did not have any debt or student loans,” he says. “But, at the time, I had just entered into what I would very soon learn to be an extremely abusive and toxic relationship, which I would then go into tens of thousands of dollars worth of credit card debt.”
The young attorney said that after maxing out every credit card to his name, he needed to find a way to pay off the debt, and quickly. “Back in 2016, I sort of fell into media journalism, accidentally of course, after submitting a 20-page thesis to the Ohio State Bar Association, analyzing the legal implications mobile AR gaming brings to the average consumer and small business, using the then-newly launched Pokemon Go as a case study. It just took off from there.”
It was at that moment that Rossow found himself with invitations to write for media outlets like HuffPost and Forbes. “I of course was simultaneously practicing law, helping clients address Ohio’s opioid epidemic. The law professor revealed that through the world of journalism, many individuals, including Hollywood’s public figures and Silicon Valley’s brightest minds were still lacking an essential resource that is often overlooked when paying enormous amounts of money to larger agencies.
“These agencies are focused on the big fish associated with your brand, leaving open many small gaps that just sit idle. Whether you are a small or large business owner, you can’t afford to leave behind those gaps. I help clients recognize what those gaps are on an affordable scale.”
Rossow describes any brand as a newborn baby—fragile and requiring attention 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “You must nurture it and discipline it,” he advises, adding that “failure to attend to your brand, big or small, will only lead to neglect and it ending up on ‘the streets’, left to fend for itself. We all know how that turns out.”
Recently, VaynerMedia’s Gary Vaynerchuk recently launched a suite of consulting services that are more affordable than VaynerMedia’s full-service global creative and media agency, building a structure designed to help Gen-Z build relevancy with today’s newest technologies.
Like Vaynerchuk’s services, AR Media focuses on content curation surrounding social media platforms like TikTok, as well as understanding how artificial intelligence, crypto, and our media landscape as a whole, converge and conflict. He has worked with many high-profile individuals, including, but not limited to Hollywood’s Lorenzo Rusin and recently Jason Gann at the EMERGE Virtual Cannabis Conference & Expo. AR Media also regularly works with Nashville’s Jesslee, Dave McElroy, and Pagentri. But his focus is also to teach good, digital hygiene to younger talent, previously working with TikTok’s Gavin Magnus and child actresses Mylah Caputo and Bella Alexandras.
“Managing your online reputation requires someone who understands the nature and significance of the technology available to us today. The one thing I cannot stand is when individuals are held out as ‘experts on millennials’—what does that even mean? How can a 40 or 50-year-old person understand what goes on in our heads? What do we like? What technologies stimulate us to create? Plain and simple, they can’t. You need a millennial skilled enough to advise others based on technologies they are using themselves, successfully.”
