University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Get on TV!
Book

Get on TV!

The Insider's Guide to Pitching the Producers and Promoting Yourself

Jacquie Jordan
Sourcebooks, 2006
Buy book or audiobook

Read or listen offline

Amazon Kindle
auto-generated audio
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×
auto-generated audio

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Oprah, The Today Show, your local talk shows and even reality TV all offer unprecedented opportunities for personal and professional promotion. Position yourself to reap the rewards by targeting the right shows and applying a few insider rules for getting on the air. Author Jacquie Jordan, an Emmy-nominated TV pro, knows just what producers seek in the perfect "TV guestpert." She delivers the goods in this thorough guide to promoting yourself, your company or your product on the air. When you read this, you’ll want to get right to work. Getting TV air time will no longer seem like an impossible goal, although you will notice in Jordan’s case studies that truth is often stranger than fiction in TV Land. getAbstract.com recommends this book to professionals who want to polish their presentations, understand talk show production behind the scenes and become TV guests. Go get your 15 minutes of fame.

Summary

So You Want to Be on TV

Why even try to get on TV? Television appearances focus attention - potentially worth millions of dollars - on your product, company or idea. Imagine the opportunities that unscripted television programs present, whether they focus on issues or entertainment.

Whatever the show, your gateway onto the air is through the producers. They make it happen, not the host or the director, no matter what you see in your living room. The typical network TV show has many inside layers, so cut through and target the decision-makers. The top producer is the central person in the development process. Segment producers and associate producers work in the trenches, handling the daily details of putting a show on the air. The booker, the researcher and the production assistant are also significant. Producers with more senior titles, such as supervising producers, executive producers or network executives, manage the business aspects of a show, not the content, and are not your best contacts. The host fulfills another set of demands and, similarly, usually is not directly involved with content. Getting in the production loop is more important than speaking to the...

About the Author

Jacquie Jordan is a twice Emmy-nominated TV producer with credits on Maury, Geraldo, Donny & Marie and The Montel Williams Show. She is co-executive producer for Sunday Morning Shootout and a media consultant who connects guests with shows and conducts seminars and workshops.

Comment on this summary