When it comes to getting a corporate media gig, the standard procedure is build up your experience through smaller companies until a bigger company decides they like you. At least, it used to be. Kayo Sports wanted to do something different for its next presenter, running a Call Up competition to win a paid role on Fox Footy’s Super Saturdays.
After thousands of entries and six rounds of auditions, 22-year-old Jarra Davis came out on top. While Jarra hasn’t had any professional on-screen experience, he’s built up a following on TikTok over the last five years yapping about his takes to his audience of 170k.
The law student from Gippsland will now have his name in lights on prime-time television, and it’s stories like Jarra’s that represent a shift in the media industry; not just a new generation of talent in corporate media who’ve migrated from content creation but also a new way for companies to seek and hire talent. Before he heads into the 2025 season we had a chat with him for Insider Trading.
Hint: if you’re looking to break into the creative industry, check out Pedestrian JOBS and craft your next move.
Insider Trading: Jarra Davis
Howdy Jarra! Congrats on the role. A 22 year old in the Fox Commentary team is unheard of. What’s your job title and what are you going to be doing for Fox Footy?
At the moment “Glorified Intern” is what I’ve been running with recently. We’ll sort of be doing everything. Super Saturday is unreal in itself, it’s a 12 hour stream of non-stop footy. So it opens up a lot of window of time and space for my role to develop and figure out where we’re going to work. Hopefully on different panels, across the social media, with all the different hosts across all the different shows and the coverage. I want to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
It’s really exciting to have a Gen Z bloke enter a very Millennial/Gen X dominated scene. How significant is it for Fox Sports, and any industry for that matter, to have a younger voice in the team?
I don’t think anyone has ever sort of, picked someone up from the metaphorical street and put them on TV and in front of a camera. It is quite revolutionary. I think it is important to have a young voice, a young face, someone that could connect with maybe a different sort of audience that maybe Kayo and Fox are trying to get to, like those casual viewers who want to understand the game but don’t really know the proper lingo for midfield stoppages and things like that. So if I can bridge that gap, I think that’s what I’m going to try. I just really want to make footy way more accessible for a wider audience.
What else are you aiming to accomplish with this role?
With the Super Saturday coverage hopefully I can bring as much fun and energy to the group as possible. We’ll probably start with some more segment shows where I dip my toe into the water and hopefully that can just bleed me into the audience and pick up a bit of confidence. I need to feel out where I’m really suited on the coverage, whether that’s commentary, whether that’s post game or pre-game analysis. Commentary is a whole skill that you really have to learn and it’s definitely not something that I’m necessarily super skilled at or have a massive background in. I’m lucky that I get to learn off the best in the business.
(That’s my GOAT in the back row. Image: Supplied)
Usually with a position like this, or any position really, you’d have to start in amateur leagues and work your way up. What are your thoughts on this rather unconventional hiring process?
I love it. We’ve seen in recent years that social media has genuinely changed everything and being able to build your own audience is a skillset in itself. People will look at me and go, “He got a job from a competition that ran four months”, but it was the last five years of creating content and learning the skills of producing and scripting, how to deliver certain ideas, how to package your opinion into consumable bite-sized bits that audiences can understand and also interact with.
Being able to build an audience is a really important skill especially for something like this. I do hope that more, maybe footy media, sports media, journos and everything like that should adopt this sort of hiring process where they look at people who may not have taken the most traditional path but taken the real, practical approach of just getting their hands dirty and learning the skills by themselves. I’ll be able to come into this role and if things need to be produced, I’m happy to produce. If things need to be edited or we need a script for a little skit, these are all things that I’ve done for the past five years so I can whip them up really quickly. A lot of creators do have that hands-on experience and probably just haven’t got the recognition for just yet.
Let’s talk more about that social media. Give us a little history lesson on how you got into TikTok.
A lot of creators nowadays started in that COVID year where there was really nothing to do. I was Year 12 during COVID and every Monday me and all my mates would sit down and throw our footy takes and converse for hours about footy. Then we had to go into lockdown, we weren’t allowed at school and we didn’t really have those conversations anymore but I still wanted to throw my footy opinions out and get that discussion going. So I used to just make videos spouting my footy opinion or something and then I’d just spend all day, I’m talking 5-6 hours a day, in the comment section conversing back and forth with random people I’d never met.
It was a nice little side hobby to do during uni and it just kept growing and growing across the years. We got to the point where now I can create videos online about footy and we have such a great audience that converses a lot and has strong opinions.
I guess I was just trying to recreate those lunch table debates just online.
Surely when you’re doing an analysis you throw in some Subway Surfers gameplay.
That’d be a really good idea to a bit more audience retention. Actually, I should pitch that. Maybe just like under the game, instead of just the full screen game footage, we just put the Subway Surfers or some GTA gameplay or something.
Let’s get sentimental. What is your relationship with footy?
Dad is just one of the ultimate Footy Nuffs. So he was sitting me down every night watching every footy game and footy talk show. Although my dad and I are pretty similar, I think our biggest bonding experience was the footy. Every night when I come home from school I was like, “Today I get to watch AFL 360/Bounce with Dad”; that was the thing I was looking forward to. Even when I moved out of home I would still be able to call him after an episode of the Bounce or an episode of AFL 360 and we’d chat. The love of footy grew from that bonding experience with the old man.
After he found out I got the role his first reaction was, “I can’t believe they’ve picked you because all your footy opinions come from me. So why haven’t they picked me?” and I said it’s a fair point. But no, he’s super excited. My parents don’t understand any of the social media stuff at all which is a blessing and a curse, but they’ve been super supportive. And Dad’s super excited to see me on the TV so now I’ll be the one he’ll make fun of for having a bad footy opinion.
(Jarra Davis with his childhood hero David King. Image: Supplied)
Is there anyone you looked up to as commentary role models?
I’m super lucky that we got Bruce [McAvaney] back in the day and Dennis Cometti and those legends. But I’m a radio guy. We used to love listening to the radio and having the TV on mute so having Jared Whateley was just phenomenal, and now he’s obviously here at Fox and meeting him the other day and just hearing his voice — I’ve sort of been conditioned that when his voice is on the footy is on. So the other day when he started talking to me I was like “Where’s the game!? There must be a bounce coming somewhere.”
Wicked that you’re working with these voices now. How are you getting integrated into the rest of the team? Team-building Bowling excursion?
We had a big Fox promo shoot on Thursday with all the talent from all around the country. There’s a lot of downtime at promo shoots, so just sitting down and having conversations for probably 6-7 hours with as many different people of the talent as possible and build that chemistry, build quippy personality jokes and things like that that we can hopefully bring from the private table at lunch to the on-air screen and hopefully that chemistry follows.
Is much of your style going to change now that you’re presenting to Kayo’s demographic instead of your TikTok demographic?
I know there is a relatively big difference between the two demographics and I hope they crossover because I love stuff I make and the product Fox and Kayo produce. The producers at Fox have been super inclusive of my personality and I think that’s what attracted my TikTok audience to begin with. They’re allowing me to express my personality and have a genuine say in what I want to create, putting a lot of trust in me to put my personality first. So I hope that brings the audience, if it’s worked on one platform, I can’t see why it’s not going to work on another.
I want the ego to come out a little bit. Thousands of entries for the Call Up. You got picked. What makes you so special?
I don’t know. I’m super lucky that I’ve had a relatively large audience. I wasn’t mainstream footy media but at least I had a brand and a voice. I think what really stood out and what I’ve been told is the fact that I have been able to build such a varied audience. Compared to the traditional splits of age and gender across footy and most footy media, I sort of have been able to bridge the gap between them all and that maybe comes from the way I script the videos or the way I deliver it, I’m not sure. I hope that’s sort of what I can bring and maybe the point of difference they were looking for.
I also used my audition to shout out the people who I thought were really talented but probably haven’t quite got the recognition from the mainstream yet. So maybe that was what they enjoyed from the first audition.
(Man just emits footy aura. Image: Supplied)
What’s some advice you’d give for content creators?
I’ve always had the idea that you should create what you wanted to see. As soon as COVID came, all I wanted to do was have those footy debates and footy discussions with my mates. So I put that on the internet because those are the things I wanted to have. So if there’s something that you want to watch or you wish someone made, that’s something you could make and people would enjoy it. You attract the audience that you want. So I’ve always basically just said, if you want to watch something and it’s not out there, create it.
You’re still in uni, doing a degree in Law and Politics so I’m getting the impression footy wasn’t the Plan A career for you.
I’ve always wanted to be lawyer. The research side of law has been sort of my thing. I was never a good enough footballer to make anything of being an athlete and what made up the footy media world was ex-players and journalists. I never wanted to be a journalist and I’m not good enough to be an ex-player so that footy media dream slowly fell away over the years until this opportunity came. That’s sort of the revolutionary aspect is that they’re genuinely getting someone who’s not in the space at all, or who otherwise probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity.
I promised mum that I will finish the degree. As the social media stuff started to pick up I took a couple steps back like lowering the class load. I’m in my final year and I absolutely will finish it and then if footy crashes and burns then — and I hate saying this — law is a good second option to have.
Anything that I’ve missed?
I just really want to hit on the fact that this is such a special thing for me personally but also it really is a special thing for the online community. People who maybe don’t have an audience yet who are thinking “Oh, there’s no way I’m going to be able to get into that sort of role or something” but there is genuinely a path for everyone.
The fact that I grew up watching all these people and now I’m going to be working alongside them — genuinely the best footy media in the world, people who last year I was so excited to turn on the TV and put on The Bounce or put on AFL 360 or AFL Tonight, I’m now a part of that. It really goes to show that this is such a revolutionary thing and I think it’s going to be a step in the right direction. A lot of other companies and a lot of other businesses are going to start doing the same thing. You might see a few of those competitions coming in the next couple of years from different places and I think that’s a really exciting step.
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The post Insider Trading: 22 Y.O. TikTok Creator Jarra Davis Lands Fox Footy Gig appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
