The Shake has exclusively obtained an internal message sent by Jake Sasseville to his staff members on the eve of Late Night Republic’s promotional and music events that begin this month and continue through the fall. In the email, sent very late on Friday night, Jake lays out his vision and expectations for driving an extremely aggressive schedule of during the tour. The tour’s travel dates were finalized earlier in the day on Friday. (See the first dates here.)
The unedited email is reproduced below.
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Ypulse, a company that researches teen and young adult consumer behavior, published a long Q&A with Jake this week on its youth marketing channel. Along with information about Jake’s business philosophy and decisions, the interview includes Jake’s take on the Leno-Conan situation.
Read the interview.
The San Diego Entertainer published a story today urging the local CW network to keep Jake on television for the fall. The station is considering shifting Jake’s timeslot to a made-for-TV movie! (Frankly, that’s about as wise as putting a half-hour jazz-flute performance on the air.)
Read the article and let folks in San Diego know that you want Jake to stay on the air. Give the station a shout on Facebook and Twitter, too!
By Christina LeBlanc
Correspondent
Late Night Republic Mission Control (Visualization)
Jake Sasseville’s “Late Night Republic” is anything but conventional, right down to its producing style. While “Late Night Republic” and its host are based in New York, co-executive producer and chief strategist Mara Marich Tardy operates from Texas, in what the staff calls “Mission Control Houston.”
A Cable Ace and multiple BDA winner and Emmy nominee as writer, director and producer, with many years of experience working with MTV New York, Mara’s advertising and entertainment background make her an invaluable member of the “LNR” team – a team whose members span the country from Los Angeles (public relations) to San Francisco (digital) to Oklahoma (tour coordination) to New York (show production) to Florida (financial) and up to Maine (digital).
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By Bobby Guerette
Digital Producer
Jake was featured on the front page of Wikipedia this morning. Wikipedia editors had pulled a piece of trivia from the Jake Sasseville entry and posted it in the “Did You Know?” section of the main page from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The featured item said, “Did you know… that to secure sponsorship for his TV show, New York-based host Jake Sasseville talked his way onto a local broadcast 700 miles away, so he would be seen by executives at his target’s headquarters?”
That’s in reference to the time in 2008 when Jake traveled to Peoria, Illinois, and appeared on a local morning show in an attempt to attract State Farm as an advertiser. An Inc. Magazine correspondent later reported on Jake’s visit under the headline, “Too Much Chutzpah?”
According to Google, Wikipedia was the fifth most-visited site on the web last month, with 280 million unique visitors and 6.5 billion page views.
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By Bobby Guerette
Digital Producer
Monday’s issue of Ad Age, the advertising industry’s leading trade publication, features a story on the unique partnership between “Late Night Republic” and Pringles Xtreme.
The story begins: “Procter & Gamble could have gone with a lot of late-night hosts to promote its Pringles Xtreme crisps — Jimmy Kimmel, Jay Leno, David Letterman or Conan O’Brien. But it chose instead Jake Sasseville.”
It’s a good read for anyone interested in business and media in the 21st century.
Read the story. (PDF)
By Max Mogensen
Special Correspondent
When we watch a television show or a movie, we don’t always realize how many people it takes to bring such productions to life. Dozens of people, for example, labor to create Late Night Republic, often working far from the spotlight. I connected with Vi Ramon, executive assistant to host and executive producer Jake Sasseville, to discuss her role in the organization.
“It’s odd,” says Vi, “I’m not very organized in my own life, but I’m super organized when it comes to other people’s lives.”
When Vi was a girl, she used to organize her grandparents’ junk drawer for fun. And if you ask her, not much has changed since she was a girl. Vi’s job is to give her boss all the information he needs exactly when he needs it, to make connections, to record meetings, to handle multiple schedules. Her job, in effect, is to organize the junk drawer that is Jake’s work life.
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By Max Mogensen
Special Correspondent
An interview with Jake Sasseville tends to feel a little like his late night talk show: never predictable, zany one moment and heartfelt the next, and always slightly off track, despite the best efforts of everyone involved. While filming in New York, Jake filled me in on his new show and a myriad of other things. (Letterman, watch your back!)
Max Mogensen: Late Night Republic? In a soundbite.
Jake Sasseville: Like, the whole show?
MM: Well, give me the history.
JS: I guess it was when I was 14, in Maine, watching Katie Holmes on Dawson’s Creek and learning to masturbate, and it hit me that I wanted to create television that was as compelling as that for my generation. I started on local access as The Edge, and in 2003 we were syndicated by a Fox affiliate in Maine. When the show moved to New York, I analyzed, really for the first time, what worked about it and what didn’t. We self-syndicated on ABC affiliates around the country, and at the same time did the Jake After Jimmy campaign. In August, we launched the new show.
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