The Oprah Effect: The Industry Behind Her Show’s Guest List

Media coach and marketing strategist Susan Harrow, who literally wrote a book about getting on Oprah, notes on her website that hiring a publicist to get booked on a top talk show might cost $2,000 to $10,000 per month on retainer – with no guarantee of success. One consultant charges more than $1,500 just to try to get a client booked on Oprah, Harrow noted. Another charges $30,000 once a client is booked on the show.

How does a publicist get a person booked on the show? Celebrities take their own route to Oprah’s couch.  For non-celebrities, the trip might start with first getting accepted as a publicist’s client.

Media experts say a publicist’s pitch usually entails an attention-grabbing headline and a paragraph detailing what’s intriguing about a guest or what he or she is promoting. Adding statistics helps. “Your goal is not to give producers all of the information on a subject. Your goal is to get them to call you,” Harrow said.

A respectable publicist will work with a client only if there’s a chance of success. “Long shots” need not apply. “People think that Oprah’s going to change their lives, and she can,” said Harrow. “They believe that Oprah is the holy grail that’s going to make them a million overnight. While it can happen, it’s the person who is really completely ready for that kind of fame and fortune that it really works for. And you do have to be ready. It’s the highest level of media that there is – the top talk show in the world.”

In the past, Harrow noted, the websites of fledgling businesses publicized on the Oprah show have been overwhelmed, crashing as a result. Oprah’s producers now try to ensure that a potential guest’s business can handle millions of website hits and astronomical sales increases.

“The real work begins after the show,” said Harrow. “If you’re not set up systemwise, then you’re not taking full advantage of being on the show. I mean everything from having enough inventory to having a call center to fulfilling orders to being able to respond to the kinds of [new] opportunities that are there. You have to have your back end completely ready.”

Lisa Price, president of Carol’s Daughter, now a multimillion dollar  hair and skin care company with nine stores nationwide, learned just how difficult it could be to meet the demand of new customers after an Oprah endorsement. She appeared on the Oprah show in 2002. “The exposure was huge and immediate,” Lois Haram, general manager of Carol’s Daughter, told CNBC. “The phones [were] ringing off the hook. The orders were coming in and Lisa was very, very quickly outgrowing even the size of the business that she had already created.”

Eventually, and in part due to the “Oprah effect,” Price attracted influential business partners, raising $10 million from a group of investors that included such celebrities as Jay-Z, Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith and record producer Tommy Mottola and his wife, the singer Thalia. Price was then able to open a sleek flagship store in Harlem and the brand began appearing in Sephora cosmetic stores and Macy’s.

So far, Harrow has media trained four Oprah guests. They all share certain characteristics, she said. “The person needs to be natural and authentic — comfortable with him or herself. The other thing is, the [person] must be an expert in a field or topic, and must be able to express [him- or herself] clearly, and jargon-free. That might seem obvious, but I can’t tell you how many academics I’ve trained who don’t speak [jargon-free] English.”