There are limits to the human attention span, which is why a pitch must be brief, concise, and interesting,

If I had any advice to give, it's to be your own toughest critic when you write a spec or pitch -- a great idea goes a long way, but it's important to craft and polish your work so that you're communicating your ideas clearly and concisely, and that they're as entertaining as can be (remember, competition is stiff). And if you're pitching, put yourself in the mind of the producer or executive you're pitching to: figure out how to make your idea specific to the show, yet be inventive -- they'll want to hear something they might not have come up with on their own, that's why they're taking pitches in the first place.

1. Introduce yourself and the big idea: 5 minutes. 2. Explain the budget and secret sauce: 10 minutes. 3. Offer the deal: 2 minutes. 4. Stack frames for a hot cognition: 3 minutes.

A good pitch is set up in three acts: The first act is the past, the second act is the present, and the third act is the future. The first act is where you’ve been — what you want, how you came to want it, and what you’ve done so far to get it. The second act is where you are now in your work and how you’ve worked hard and used up most of your resources. The third act is where you’re going, and how exactly the person you’re pitching can help you get there.

story needs the following elements: 1. It must be brief, and the subject must be relevant to your pitch. 2.

The person making the pitch has presumably put a lot of time, thought, and energy into gathering their thoughts and presenting them clearly to an audience. But the rest of the people in the room are asked to react. Not absorb, not think it over, not consider — just react. Knee-jerk it. That’s no way to treat fragile new ideas.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

Keep in mind that pitching investors is a process that requires preparation, data, vision, and honesty. And even if an investor passes on this particular start-up, don’t burn the bridge.

As you are pitching your idea, the croc brain of the person sitting across from you isn't 'listening' and thinking, 'Hmm, is this a good deal or not?' Its reaction to your pitch basically goes like this: 'Since this is not an emergency, how can I ignore this or spend the least amount of time possible on it?'

This filtering system of the crocodile brain has a very short-sighted view of the world. Anything that is not a crisis it tries to mark as 'spam.'

If you got a chance to look at the croc brain's filtering instructions, it would look something like this:
1. If it's not dangerous, ignore it
2. If it's not new and exciting, ignore it.
3. If it is new, summarize it as quickly as possible - and forget about the details.
And finally there is this specific instruction:
4. Do not send anything up to the neocortex for problem solving unless you have a situation that is really unexpected and out of the ordinary.

These are the basic operating policies and procedures of our brains. No wonder pitching is so difficult.

A lot of people come up with these really elaborate concepts, and they get into the weeds of the concepts and how the story's gonna be. That's not what executives wanna see. They wanna see characters that they can engage with, and, also it sounds a little cliche, but the so-called "elevator pitch" or seven words, "try to describe your show in seven words", is a really good exercise. I found it just... work through, y'know, what your idea is about. That elevator pitch is basically "I've got a few seconds to tell somebody my idea, how would I say it?"

you’ll need to be prepared to deliver a high-value proposition. You’ve got very little time to articulate why that person should not try to get off the phone as quickly as possible. Remember, it’s all about them. What can you do for them?

In the same way that I tend to make up my mind about people within thirty seconds of meeting them, I also make up my mind about whether a business proposal excites me within about thirty seconds of looking at it. I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics.

Nothing infuriates reporters and editors more, I’m told, than to get a pitch from someone who clearly has no idea what their publication is about or who their audience is.

Television is to news as a bumper sticker is to Shakespeare. I remember hearing an analogy once that went something like that. Your typical nightly, 35-minute TV news broadcast is a headline service with pictures. Five minutes of police-blotter reporting - fires, murders, car accidents, etc. - five minutes of human-interest stories and small talk, five minutes of weather, five minutes of sports, ten minutes of commercials, and maybe a minute or two for business, science, politics, and affairs of the world.