How can I tell who the power player is in a pitch meeting?
When you go into a room to pitch a reality show, often you will be in a room with several network executives, and often you won't actually know them all. Sometimes they'll trick you - not on purpose, but sometimes someone bigger might be in the room. It happens to me sometimes, too, where the meeting is with one person but then they're brought into a room and there's more than that person there and you may not even be sure who everybody is. It is OK to ask everybody's title. They should introduce themselves with their title. You're going have to go with titles to work out the power player at the network; you're going to have to know whether directors are higher than managers, whether VPs are higher than executive VPs. It's that simple. I would definitely recommend, though, if you're going in to pitch a network, that you should really know the flowchart of that network. You should know the names of everybody's boss, and everybody's boss's boss. If you don't know that, you're going to have a little trouble in the early phases of the meeting, which is often chit-chat about what the boss just told them they're looking for, or the fact that their boss just got fired, or the fact that there's a new boss in town. You need to know all of that stuff; you need to be educated on who you're pitching to. People at networks like to be known. They like to have people come in who know what they're doing and who they are. It's not that hard to research prior to your network pitch meeting. You should know who everybody is. up to the president of the network.
