//Creating Measurable Growth Through Media Development with Jacquie Jordan

Creating Measurable Growth Through Media Development with Jacquie Jordan

PRP 11 | Media Development

 

No one publisher, no one publicist, nobody in this industry does it without the help of others in the industry. Jacquie Jordan, founder of TVGuestpert, a media development company that raises the profile of guestperts in the media and grows their clients’ core business, works with businesses on their branding, promotion, marketing, producing and development as well as their on-camera execution. Jacquie talks about publicity, media exposure, branding alignment, and why she thinks the guru is gone on every level. Find out more about what Jacquie does and how her company, TVGuestpert, promotes clients within the collective narrative that we see in the media world.

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Creating Measurable Growth Through Media Development with Jacquie Jordan

We are excited to have Jacquie Jordan, a cool publicist because she does some things that we’re going to talk about that other publicists do but not as technically as Jacquie does. She’s got a whole program based around it that we’re going to talk about. She is the Founder of the ten-year-old Silicon Beach based, TVGuestpert, Guestpert Publishing and on TVOnCameraTraining.com. TVGuestpert is a media development company that raises the profile of Guestperts in the media and grows their clients’ core business. With TVGuestpert, Jacquie works with businesses on their branding, promotion, marketing, producing and development as well as their on-camera execution. Jacquie has been involved in booking and supervising or producing as many as 10,000-plus television guests.

Her reign has become successfully launching and executing many syndicated daytime programs and cable shows. She’s known for her ability to find a heart in any story and Jacquie garnered her second daytime Emmy for Best Show on Donny & Marie with Sony Pictures. Jacquie’s foray into talent comes from her time in the trenches as a nationally recognized producer in broadcast television. As a showrunner for the long-running AMC series, Sunday Morning Shoutout hosted by Hollywood icons chair of Mandalay Entertainment, Peter Guber and former editor-in-chief of Variety, Peter Bart. Celebrity guests produced by Jacquie include Steven Spielberg, Charlize Theron, Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie, Peter Jackson, George Clooney and Dustin Hoffman. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

Let’s have an informal chat here about publicity. Jacquie is also a New York Times bestselling publisher. You’re all probably looking right now going, “Juliet, why would you have another publisher on?” It’s because of the collaborative efforts. No one publisher, no one publicist, nobody in this industry does it without the help of others in the industry. Tell us what you do with Guestpert TV.

My background is a two-time Emmy-nominated television producer. My work in promoting businesses, authors and experts in the media comes from the perspective of doing it as a television producer. My B2B is my work with the shows networks and studios that I work with and my B2C is my promotion of my clients, the author’s businesses and experts. The way we market our company, TVGuestpert, is that I promote to the TV shows that I have camera ready experts who can handle a three-minute segment, a five-minute segment live, a seven-minute segment, a satellite interview, a live talk interview. That’s how I promote them and that we have content ready to go.

The producers will come to us. We receive about 300 media leads a day and that traction helps inform me and the company how to set up for placement, my clients within the collective narrative that we see in the media world. There was the big Kate Spade suicide and then followed by the Anthony Bourdain suicide and the narrative that came and I guess as a content creator know the trajectory of narratives. The story was, “These people have everything that we all think we want and it wasn’t enough?” That really was the narrative. If you can be a Kate Spade, who was a twenty-something explosive fashion designer who changed the way the businesswoman carries a purse, who started the business with her husband. Has a beautiful daughter and lives in Park Avenue and has sold the business for billions of dollars and she’s not happy.

Then the other career you would want to be Anthony Bourdain and travel the world to parts unknown, sipping wine and having food with people in conversation from all over the world. Which life would you have chosen because of those were amazing lives? The collective narrative in that is that they had it all and it wasn’t enough so what is it that we need to learn? How big is depression and how big is mental illness? Does addiction play a part in these types of suicides? My job when working with my authors, my businesses and my experts is to get them into alignment into that conversation. How do we jump into that conversation with your expertise?

At TVGuestpert we hold a bi-monthly TVOnCameraTraining.com workshop. I call it a surfboard. Collective narratives are like ocean waves, some are big, some just dribble through the day and my job is to read all of the ocean waves. I’m here in Los Angeles, so if you’re a surfer, you get that. My job is to put a surfboard as the tool into my client’s hands to catch those waves. Then we work on all the incremental pieces then to make sure that the real estate for the revalue of being out there and the exposure that you’re receiving from the media is translating back to your business in some measurable way. Sometimes people expect it to be direct sales that depends on a platform, but the exposure it needs to translate in some way. This is what we do as business owners and content creators.

PRP 11 | Media Development

Media Development: Even if you are amazing in your field, experts are interchangeable and any producer knows that.

 

We talked about those people who just come in and they think they’re camera ready. Let’s chat about that a little bit so nobody makes that mistake.

To me, there are three specific phases to media exposure. There’s the effort to get it to acquire the opportunity, there’s the execution of the actual opportunity itself and then there’s the leveraging as a result of the opportunity that we had. Most people are willing to put a little bit of front-end effort to acquire the opportunity, but the assumption is that they can walk through the door because they’re successful in their own right, in their own field, in their own business, and in their own industry. They’re usually fantastic public speakers who do large workshops or events that are industry-related. To execute, especially in the genre I’m working in, which is national television appearances.

That takes an art form that personally I’m not willing to risk somebody else’s inexperience on whether they declare it or not. I’ve been around too long to know how somebody is and my analogy is you want to play in the Major League Baseball game, but have you picked up a bat? Have you been to batting practice? Do you even have the right gloves? Do you know how long it takes for you to run around the bases? Do you know the difference between stopping at first or sliding into third? Those are techniques that are required to be a professional expert, Guestpert as we call it on camera. You just don’t walk into that for the first time and do that.

Plus you’re staking your professional reputation and business on your ability to deliver the messaging or the content that you have been booked to deliver. That’s a lot of liability to walk into with an assumption that you can just do it. Their delusion is that it’s actually an interview. It’s not an interview. It is a tango and the choreographer of the tango is the producer. As a company, we are advocates of a producer of being my specific background. We’re advocates and the choreographer creates through the content that the Guestpert has provided in that pre-production part.

The platforms are significantly changing. The spiritual guru, the man who has the answer, is gone on every level. Click To Tweet

The host is the leader and the tango that guest has to follow, but the currency of the content is the music for the tango and there’s a rhythm that has to happen. You have to know your steps. It’s not so scripted that it’s not authentic, but if you don’t know the basic steps of the dance and you have to hit the song in three minutes, it’s a very expensive learning curve for all parties involved. I discourage it but I do find a lot of resistance from people wanting to get the practice in. I do know that those who are willing to do it are far greater, more superior and more successful because a producer of a show that you are booked on, they know whether you’re a pro or not. They know whether this is a Major League Baseball game or someone who’s stepping up to the Little Leagues for the first time and they’re not going to be fooled.

My job is to open the door that you can go in and out of as a content provider for the show. That’s my goal for you. I don’t want you to just do it once. I want you to be so fabulous that they want you back next week and they want you back for weeks. We’ve done bookings on The Today Show where our client from Austin, Texas, had a regularly occurring spot on The Today Show in the morning, the third hour in New York City monthly because she was excellent. She had a content she provided, quality and value to the show. Obviously, you can see from my PR point of view. I’m an advocate towards making the producer’s life easy and thereby benefiting my client, which is the business owner or the expert.

For those of you who are wondering, “How important is this for me?” Jacquie, you were telling me there are more spots to fill than there are people to fill them.

At TVGuestpert, we receive about 300 media leads a day. Right now, I’m working on with my team just one of the leads is an associated Presley for business owners just talking about how to fire people that you care about on the job. That came in at 6:00 in the morning. We’re probably going to get hit with a couple more waves of some media requests. I have way more media requests to fulfill than I have qualified media experts. Stop saying that I don’t have qualified experts to fulfill it, but qualified as we market it on camera-ready experts to fulfill it. Content is the currency and I hate to pop anybody’s bubble. Even if you are amazing in your field, experts are interchangeable and any producer knows that. It’s what is the value of the content.

When we receive an inquiry and it’s nonspecific to a specific expert, sometimes we would receive a specific inquiry for you, which we go right to you. Sometimes we just respect the Associated Press. They want a business owner to give us some comments so we’ll filter it out to a variety of different experts who would have a variety of different points of view. They’ll send us back through their profile, maybe five or six speaking points, nothing complicated, just their unique point of view on that topic and then we’ll present it. In this case is a journalist and say, “Look at the variety. These are the expertise, which way do you want to go with that?” The content is the currency that we are all operating in and it’s not about the expert and it’s definitely not about the book. As a New York Times bestselling publisher who does the promotion of the books for our authors, it has to be about the story that we’re creating to get into there and not about the book. If we make it about the book, then you only have one story to promote. If we make it about everything that’s going on in the collective narrative, you’ll have 25 different ways to promote your same book.

There’s more than just book content when you’re doing this. Is it helpful for the people who are being considered to work with you to have video content already out there and different types of content and be versatile with what they talk about?

PRP 11 | Media Development

Media Development: If people don’t know who we are, what we do, and what we’re about, then we don’t have a business.

 

It blends also into branding alignment. For example, we’re in the process of writing or finishing our own company book called The Ultimate On-Camera Guidebook: Host, Experts, and Influencers. Influencers are a whole new arena. The stories that we put out in social media, in my opinion as a content creator, have to be very predetermined and carefully crafted. They cannot be random. When we pitch for a business owner, an expert, an entrepreneur or an author to the media, the first thing we do is we pitch based on a hot topic that we’ve already got some content for. We highlight the author’s platform and book plug ready. The next thing that producers do is they’re going to search. They’re going to do a Google search or a YouTube search, a social media search, a Facebook search and a website search and if that content isn’t congruent or complementary, it can knock you out in just one of those places.

For example, my personal Instagram, my personal Facebook, I jokingly say, “His friends of faces and family, furry creatures, food and some fitness fun,” but truthfully in who I am and the dimensional life that I lead, it’s this much of what I’m showing. Some people on social media go far out and quite frankly sometimes I enjoy their stories. I don’t have a judgment against it but as an advocate for their business goals, I have to monitor whether it’s in alignment from what we’re trying to achieve even with YouTube videos. Are you going for the big YouTube subscription or you’re going for a media following with some supplementary content that you have on YouTube? The producer impact, at least from how we’re advocating it is 50 seconds.

In 50 seconds, they’ve scanned all of that. They’ve looked at you. They’re going to love you instantly. You resonate. It is in alignment. What we’re selling about you as a company is a yes or it’s all over the place and it’s a static field, a lot of noise and who is this person and what are they talking about? I’m a big believer in losing old content. Let go of the older stuff that you’ve done and that’s hard for us because we fight for our successes and we fight for our wins. It’s hard and I deal with it myself. I won that. I fought for that. When Amazon bestseller was a very different kind of bestseller and one of our authors, we sold 15,000 books in one hour, that’s an Amazon bestseller. Now, it’s a whole different way of achieving it. It’s quite broad and very nonspecific to the way it was years ago when we did it.

For that author, we have to let it go because it doesn’t mean anything. TED Talks are becoming the same way too. TED Talks are like a dime a dozen right now unless it’s the value of quality produced TEDx Talk and they do exist and we’re big champions of them. I watched a TED Talk on a green screen that one of our Guestperts did and it didn’t come through us and it was so uncomfortable. That quality, that value, that brand alignment because now the window of the world has invaded all parts of our life, both personally and professionally. We just have to operate with a lot of consciousness and focus and ultimately where is it that we want to end up. We had a guest producer, Leslie Marcus from the TV show, The Doctors. She reiterated a lot of this and she gave a great feedback to the group that was in the room. She would say to some of them, “You need to do a lot of video on YouTube that is around these types of content area,” and then to somebody else she says, “You need to drop that and it needs to go away because it’s not in alignment.”

It’s a whole new field for our company that we’re having to work with and we are all collaborating with each other. We’re also all trying to figure out what is this new frontier because it’s a very undefined frontier that makes people stand out. We also said this too. I see this all the time and my TV producers see this all the time. Someone puts on their books that they’re an international bestselling author. If it’s an international bestselling author, then you have had quantified a certain amount of book sales and that’s measurable, that’s searchable and that can be found. We have access to that. A lot of people are using these big titles and big monikers. One of the reasons we have sometimes trouble as our company was self-published books, which is why we have a traditional structured publishing company in-house is because the self-published book is not vetted.

You can write anything you want in a self-published book. Your group, whoever may read it and sign off on it but when it gets to a national level show, the way the national bookers look at it, they’re like, “It’s not vetted.” You might have things that are illegal, slanderous, insightful that their legal department will not validate on air. From a promotional standpoint, it’s very difficult to promote a self-published book. A lot of my Guestperts do have self-published books and they don’t always publish through us. The focus has to become on the actual content of the platform and not the focus on the book even though I am such a believer in having books. I’m a big believer in having books. I don’t care whether you publish through us or if you get a publishing deal or if you self-publish, but it is about memorializing and anchoring your expertise into space.

You can learn by seeing what other people are doing. Click To Tweet

I don’t know if you remember, we had a conversation at a table we were at with Shannon Granich. We talked about the shift in the marketplace, which you just brought up and I think it’s important for people to understand that there has been a big shift out there and we are waiting to find out what’s next? My personal opinion that I’d love to hear you weighed in on this is Google Marketing is over. When you’re talking about influencer, we’re moving into space where you’re not only an influencer but you’re providing experiential training to those people that you’re influencing. The days of somebody being up here and just saying, “This is how I got here. Emulate me and spend a lot of money to do it,” is over. People want that influencer to hand-hold, guide me and tell me what those steps are. What are your thoughts?

I’m in the entire business of promoting experts and I do think the guru is gone on every level. The spiritual guru is gone, the man who has the answer but what I do think here is leading by example. That is the big shift. It’s not the, “Do what I say to do,” it’s, “Now, I can see who you are with all these windows we have open and I like how you’re doing it because I can see it, so can you teach me?” It’s more of an identification passing through as opposed to the guru, the person who had all the answers but behind that is the platforms are changing. The platforms are significantly changing and since I’m out here in the Hollywood area, I can say that nobody really knows.

Everybody could have a prescription for it but we’re all in the same boat right now as influencers in whatever arena that we’re doing it in. Even the national media, the syndicated television is the audience are smaller but the answer isn’t YouTube. The answer isn’t necessarily the influencer so that there isn’t a successful model that can exactly be replicated at this point. One of my personal philanthropies is I do mentor a lot of business owner women in the Los Angeles area. What I do is I look at their numbers. I’m like, “You’re not going to make enough candles out of your garage to support yourself so that’s called a hobby and not a business.” With all of these marketing pieces, we know we always have to stay in a solvent business in alignment with what our core business is but the marketing pieces, unfortunately, are necessary. If people don’t know who we are, can’t find us, don’t know what we do and don’t know what we’re about, then we don’t have a business. It is important to keep those basic structures going but in terms of what the big win is like, “Are you going to be the next Tony Robbins?” That right now is completely up for grabs.

I know another person who books a lot of people like that and she says that attendance is way down because people want the experience of, “I see you have a successful model but I need you to work with me and individualize that for me.” People throw a lot of money at the one-size-fits-all and then they’re very disappointed with the results.

The reason for us why TVGuestpert has been able to navigate and be agile in some of the changes is even though we have an infrastructure that is cookie-cutter, we treat every end result differently because the end result is different. We need systems in place to systemize what we do, but how we do it is always different and depending on the expert and the surfboard and the wave that we equip them with or the baseball game we put them in. I do think that is important. There isn’t necessarily a business model for it but I do think the fundamental basic still exists and this will probably resonate with what the work that you do is content, messaging, branding and translation of how that is all looping back to your primary core business.

We’ve been around long enough to know that some people could have a lot of show and tell and no business. I’d rather keep the business together than the show and tell. A healthy growing business has an appropriate balance of both, but too much flash and dash and too much show and tell. I’ve been around in the Hollywood game way too long and I’ve seen it all. I will say to my clients and I don’t get business for this, “I’m not in it for your fifteen minutes of fame, but I’m in it for your long haul.” What is the service your business is providing? Is it a value of the world and can my company support you through messaging and building that up? That’s what I’m in for. That’s why we’re able to have a high retention rate with our clients because there has been measurable growth in their business that we don’t take credit for but we’ve been able to participate in what we do. That makes the difference and that’s why we call ourselves a media development company instead of a PR company, even though the work that we do is essentially PR.

Thank you for all of this generous content that you’ve given us. I want you to talk about two things. You have a freebie for us to go get, but I want you to talk a little bit about this every other month workshop. I know we’re going into this, I didn’t ask you, but I didn’t realize it was every other month and it might be somebody who would want to connect with you and learn more about that.

PRP 11 | Media Development

Media Development: We have to build our platforms and become an attractive content provider that they would be interested in when we go in for a pitch meeting.

 

Just at the core business level, I’m a lot about teaching because people are hiring us from different industries and different fields of high success in their own field and they’re entering into the entertainment industry. There’s a lot of mythology that comes with it. I have to admit I have to manage expectations. I have to make sure that the client knows what they’re doing even if they don’t know what they’re doing. They think they know what they’re doing. I have to navigate when they don’t know what they’re doing. There are a couple of things that we have as I’m a big advocate of getting books published. We do a monthly five-week webinar series on GuestpertPublishing.com and the first class is free if you sign in for the class. We’ll send you the first one hour. I will take you through the book writing process, but I will also show you the marketing process as we go along. The business plan process, which is the business proposal should be going traditional and the self-publishing advantages and disadvantages versus the traditional publishing advantages and disadvantages.

Even though I’m a publisher, I present it neutrally. That’s one. If you want to do the bigger package, you can do it as a mastermind group like this on Zoom with us and we can go through a week-by-week process and there’s a little bit of group format. I work a lot with a group of five to seven people. I don’t work with groups of 30. I find that, for my teaching method, it’s most effective not one-on-one necessarily because you can learn by seeing what other people are doing. Then every other month on TVOnCameraTraining.com, we do workshops in Westwood, California in one of our corporate clients’ fabulous studios. We bring in an active working Guestpert and we have a luncheon. It’s like seven or eight.

Some of them are my current Guestpert, some of them are just vetting us out as a company. We do some content training and On-Camera Training exercises. Since you’re paying me for the workshop, I bring the guest producers on what you’re going to listen to because you’re not going to hear it from me. We get into the nuts and bolts of the whole process so you know what you’re investing in. Do the workshop first. It’s $495 for an afternoon. We feed you a nice lunch. It’s very upscale and very intimate. I’m very professional. Do that before you take on a twelve-month contract with us so that you understand the brain logos of how the company works for you and you have a scope of what the industry is because we want to stay in true alignment with the expectations of it.

We do a lot of show development for our clients. We do a lot of things. We syndicate radio shows, we can get you your radio show, and we’re a wizard star maker. They don’t put it out that way but you’re like, “I need this. I need an audiobook,” and we’re like, “We can do that.” My passion as a producer is setting up the show development. The other thing you could do if you sign up for our newsletters, we’ll send you a mandate call, which is what all the studios are looking for, which is from like A and E to ZLiving.com. If you have a show idea and people think that having a show idea is a business plan and it’s not a business plan. The networks pay their own staff tremendous amounts of money for their own ideas so they don’t.

We have to build our platforms and become an attractive content provider that they would be interested in and we go in for a pitch meeting. We work within the scope of the mandates that the networks are already developing in so that we’re not over here coming up with an idea and they’re going this way. I watched people lose a lot of money because of lack of business strategy and naïve days. Much of my company is back ending into the teaching process. Some people don’t like that but I feel like if you’re going to make these investments in, whether it’s an investment in all of your bloggers that you’re bringing on, you just should be knowledgeable about the process that you’re engaging in. We get very specific results. We’re not doing the work for you, we’re going to collaborate with you to do the work and get the results. We’re not sure on the opportunity, we’re sure on camera-ready experts.

Experts should hire experts. Click To Tweet

Some of my clients went to the workshop and said it was fabulous. It’s life-changing for them. They can find that on TVOnCameraTraining.com and then the free download, GuestpertPublishing.com. Thank you so much. This is wonderful information. I have an appointment set up because I want to find out more about what Jacquie does because of the book journey that I’m taking all of you on. I’m going to talk to her a little bit more about possibly using her because I have to hire somebody.

Experts should hire experts. I can write everybody’s bio but I still pay somebody else to write my own bio. I always believe and do it with somebody else.

I’m going to share my big fear with you. Jacquie knows in advance who she’s talking to. I’m afraid I’m going to be like that first-time weatherman who raises his arm and like massive sweat from the canvas, so think about that.

Juliet, you are literally a golden nugget. Anybody who can tap into your expertise and wisdom as a professional because of the journey that you’ve been on through your professional corporate life and advertising to your championship of publishing and business owner is so lucky. You have a lot to share. That Associated Press lead, honestly, I’ll have my office send it to you because you would be the qualified expert for that.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to spend with us.

Thank you so much.

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About Jacquie Jordan

PRP 11 | Media DevelopmentJacquie Jordan is the founder of the ten year old Silicone Beach based TVGuestpert, TVGuestpert Publishing and TVOnCameraTraining.com. TVGuestpert is a media development company that raises the profile of the Guestpert in the media and grows their client’s core business. With TVGuestpert, Jacquie works with businesses on their branding, promotion, marketing, producing and development, as well as their on-camera execution.

Jacquie has been involved in booking, supervising or producing as many as 10,000+ television guests. Her reign has come from successfully launching and executing many syndicated daytime programs and cable shows. Known for her ability to find the heart of any story, Jacquie garnered her second Daytime Emmy nomination for Best Show on Donny & Marie (Sony Pictures Television).

Jacquie’s foray in talent comes from her time in the trenches as a nationally recognized producer in broadcast television. As Showrunner of the long running AMC series Sunday Morning Shootout, hosted by Hollywood Icons – Chair of Mandalay Entertainment, Peter Guber and Former Editor-in-Chief of Variety, Peter Bart. Celebrity guests produced by Jacquie include Steven Spielberg, Charlize Theron, Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie, Peter Jackson, George Clooney and Dustin Hoffman.

Simultaneously, as Executive Producer, Jacquie launched the copy-cat formula of Shootout for the TVGuide Channel, Square-Off with a focus on the television industry hosted by Andy Wallenstein and Brian Lowry of Variety. Jacquie vetted the best the industry had to offer – from NBC head Ben Silverman, Shonda Rhimes to known television stars like Jon Cryer and Mark Harmon.

As a New York Times Best Selling Publisher, Publisher’s Weekly is quoted as saying, “Jordan seems to have succeeded at her goal as laid out on the TVGuestpert website,” when talking about the success of The TVGuestpert Publishing orchestrated, The Art of Having It All hitting the coveted list.

As a published author of Get on TV! The Insider’s Guide to Pitching the Producers and Promoting Yourself! (Sourcebooks 2006) and Heartfelt Marketing: Allowing the Universe to be Your Business Partner (BurmanBooks 2010), she has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Feedback Magazine, Emmy Magazine, and the cover of Woman’s World Magazine. As a commentator on television regarding the business of the industry and pop culture, Jacquie’s appearances include Fox Reality, Good Day New York, Fox, ABC Family, CBS’s Big Shot Live, TV Guide Channel, CBS Evening News, FX and countless radio shows. Jacquie is a graduate of the University of Delaware, with a B.A. in Communications and a minor in theater.

She currently resides in Los Angeles spending her free time practicing yoga, raising awareness around animal neglect and mentoring women entrepreneurs.

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By | 2023-07-26T07:22:20+00:00 December 1st, 2018|Podcasts|0 Comments

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