How to Work the Film & TV Markets

A Guide for Content Creators

Heather Hale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317626916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

How to Work the Film & TV Markets takes independent filmmakers, television and digital content creators on a virtual tour of the entertainment industry's trade shows — the circulatory system of the entire global media landscape. This book highlights the most significant annual events around the world, details a dossier of all the players that frequent them and examines all the elements that drive the market value and profitability of entertainment properties. In-the-trenches insights from our modern, real-world marketplace are contextualized into immediately implementable practical advice. Make the most of your finite investments of funds, time and creative energy to optimize your odds for success within the mainstream, business-to-business circuit but learn how to select, apply and scale prudent, proven principles to drive your own Do-It-Yourself/Direct-to-the-Consuming-Crowd fundraising, distribution and promotional success.

Heather Hale demystifies these markets, making them less intimidating, less confusing and less overwhelming. She shows you how to navigate these events, making them far more accessible, productive — and fun!

This creative guide offers:

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• An in-depth survey of the most significant film, TV and digital content trade shows around the world;

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• An overview of the co-production market circuit that offers financing and development support to independent producers;

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• An outline of the market-like festivals and key awards shows;

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• A breakdown of who's who at all these events — and how to network with them;

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• Hot Tips on how to prepare for, execute and follow up on these prime opportunities;

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• Low-budget key art samples and game plans;

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• A social media speed tour with a wealth of audience engagement ideas.

Visit the book's space on www.HeatherHale.com for additional resources and up-to-date information on all these events.

Part I
The Markets

1 What Is a Market?

Film and television markets are the entertainment industry’s trade shows and like everything else in show business, they tend to be more glamorous, faster paced and much more intimidating than most other business sectors. Following a competitive, annual globe-trotting circuit akin to that of pro golfers, anglers or race car drivers, content providers continent-hop to meet, pitch to and hopefully negotiate face-to-face with financiers, sales agents, distributors and exhibitors from every culture and platform. Whether just initiating the development of a new concept, keeping tabs on active sales campaigns or periodically touching base with relationships solidified over decades, these markets are where fruitful, long-term relationships are born and enriched.

Entire cottage industries have popped up around these mass migrations. Elements of the full spectrum of the industry emerge locally or follow the flock to where the action is. Software vendors, legal and financial service providers, locations luring production and publicists enticing attention to their clients or clients’ projects all come in droves. Reporters stalk the market floor for industry scoops while critics pan the symbiotic and often concurrent festival circuit silt for gold. Of course, as with any industry, all of this heat and activity also attracts a whole host of posers, players, scam artists, sharks, wannabes and someday-might-bes who flock to the markets too, crowding the many proactive independent producers trying to navigate the whole hectic scene to find their productive place in it. But everyone shares the same goal: to do some business.

Market Establishing Shot

Exhibition Space

Exhibitors rent out booths or stands on the market floors, in the pavilions or venue hotel rooms. As an example, in the case of the American Film Market, every bed is removed from the beachfront Loews Hotel in Santa Monica and each hotel room is converted into office suites and temporary meeting and screening rooms as per each company’s schematic. Over at the annual conference of the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE), the market floor at the Fontainebleau in Miami, Florida is augmented by its four towers, poolside cabanas and suite overflow at the adjacent Eden Rock Hotel — all customized into showcase spaces.

Source: © NATPE.

Source: © NATPE. Courtesy SWPix and NATPE.

Source: © NATPE.

The day before each market opens, exhibiting company representatives line the walls of their suites or booths with posters. They load display stands with catalogs and one sheets, hook up flat screen TVs and set up iPads to show off trailers, sizzle reels, completed scenes and episodes. DVDs and flash drives are pre-loaded with screeners at the ready as tradeshow giveaways to qualified leads.

Screenings

Screenings vary from theaters that are booked well in advance for highly publicized red-carpet gala events, complete with stars and paparazzi; to small group viewings booked for first thing on a weekday morning in converted hotel rooms; to spontaneous, one-on-one tablet screenings while standing at lounge tables during the many happy-hour gatherings. It is not uncommon for prospective buyers to have already viewed all of the inventory they are interested in acquiring prior to attending the market via secure viewing databases like Cinando.¹ Instead of traveling halfway around the world to stare at screens non-stop during the market, they focus their precious limited time on building rapport face-to-face and closing deals with professionals they’ve come to meet in person.

Ask any exhibitor, at any trade show, in any industry: “Who do you want walking around the market floor?” Their answer will be unanimous: “qualified buyers.” Anything else is distracting clutter to their primary purpose of investing their time, energy and company resources,

explains Jonathan Wolf, Managing Director of the American Film Market (AFM). “For the first fifteen years, that’s all it was.” But things change . . .

Educational and Networking Opportunities

Since the turn of the millennium, the markets have begun to diversify their reach to encompass the independent, creative producing class. In addition to the sales foci of their market floors, every show now offers educational conferences, panels, pitching and networking opportunities. “Like a super tanker out in the ocean, these events change slowly,” Jonathan continues. “Attendees who haven’t been in a long time are often surprised at how different the show is in its tenor or tone. The Filmmaker’s Lounge, for example, was unheard of 15 years ago.”

Many events strive to facilitate matchmaking opportunities like co-production marketplaces, topic-specific roundtables and invite-only cocktails, meals or niche educational and networking forums. Cannes led the pack with their Producers Network and Producers Workshop. Virtually all the other events have followed suit with customized educational tracts and private cocktail parties enabling qualified and emerging professionals the opportunity to interact with their accredited tribes.

All of the events are experimenting with matchmaking services. Jenean Atwood Baynes led the charge when she was the Director of Buyer Initiatives for NATPE, aggressively experimenting with various iterations of the NATPE Navigator, offering a white glove treatment to participating exhibitors by providing meeting concierge services as well as testing a myriad different speed-dating-like pitching opportunities for vetted and prepped-in-advance professional producers.

Many badges (but rarely day passes) come with year-round access to connectivity databases similar to LinkedIn for each specific market. As examples: Cinando, MYAFM and myNATPE enable attendees to do advance research and follow-up for a year after each event. Most venues also have ever-improving and usually free mobile apps that dramatically increase your on-site productivity.

What's the Difference Between a Market and a Festival?

This is not meant to be overly simplistic. Quite the contrary: it is incr edibly common even for industry professionals of all ranks and longevity to lump these events together and crisscross their references synonymously in conversation. When referencing “Cannes,” a seasoned veteran might be referring to Le Marché du Film (the Cannes Film Market), the Festival de Cannes (the Cannes Film Festival), MIPCOM or MIPTV (television markets) or even MIDEM (a market for the music industry’s ecosystem) — all different events, held at different times throughout the year — but at the same facilities in the same beautiful eponymous French city. These blurred lines become all the more muddled to the uninitiated as the film market and festival collide on the Croisette (the beach front promenade), where the crush of red-carpet premiere crowds can make it difficult for dealmakers to hustle from meeting to meeting.

Confusion Abounds

Berlinale (the Berlin International Film Festival) is inextricably integrated with its concurrent and adjacent European Film M rket (EFM). Is TIFF in September or October? Well, the Toronto International Film Festival is in September but the Tokyo International Film Festival is the very next month, in October. Are there two AFMs? Well, the American Film Market is in Santa Monica in November, separate and distinct — and a whole world away from — the Asian Film Market in Korea, the month before, in October, which is held in conjunction with the Busan International Film Festival. “Toronto” is often talked about as if it were a market, as is Sundance, because so many sales and such great industry buzz results from these fine Tier 1 festivals. Although neither have market floors, suites or pavilions, they both enjoy robust market-like activity and have many market-like elements.²

In some cases, it’s hard to know which event you’re attending. Many attendees are blissfully oblivious to these distinctions — and that’s fine if you’re there for fun — but if you’re investing your money with intention, it’s important to be able to delineate between these events and their purposes. Far too many chagrined filmmakers have mistakenly bought a pass to a festival when they meant to get a badge for its market. Or worse: they committed thousands of dollars in airfare, hotels and registrations, only to find themselves on the other side of the globe — during the wrong week — at its sibling event they confused it with, making it nearly impossible for them to achieve their initial intentions. These “learning opportunities” can, of course, result in a lot of edifying experiences but far better for you to clearly understand their disparities in advance in order to more effectively pursue your goals — and enjoy them both for what they offer.

Festivals Versus Markets

Festivals are curated. They are subject to the festival director’s taste or the gatekeepers passing judgment on quality. There are no “prizes” given at markets. Nor is there any kind of a selection or vetting process. The size and scope of the material presented at the markets represents essentially the entire spectrum of that year’s (or the past few years’ worth of) inventory. To put this in perspective: the 21 films in competition at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival were dwarfed by the 3,350 films that were presented at its concurrent Cannes Film Market.

Festivals are typically about the art, honoring the craft and audience enjoyment. They are about community. And while many attract international filmmakers, they tend

to be more locally based or sometimes genre-focused. Festivals are usually open to the public whereas markets are typically restricted to accredited industry professionals for the purposes of sales (to then turn around and sell those same products to the wider, public audience — sometimes even via the promotional platform of festivals).

• Festivals = Show
• Markets = Business

Typically, the panelists at film markets are producers, distributors, sales agents and attorneys revealing the inner workings of the business of show with a unified focus on sales, sales and more sales. The same is true at the TV markets, but here, where episodic or serial content is king, you are more likely to see panels of Show Runners and Writer-Producers (as Creative Executives) as well, with an educational focus on future trends.

Directors don’t typically attend markets unless they are coming wearing one of their other multi-hyphenate hats (attending instead as a writer-director or producerdirector), trying to set up projects or transact deals. Their domain tends to remain over on the festival circuit where directors are king and art is their queen. On panels at festivals, directors, actors and department heads share “in the trenches” stories about their creative collaborative processes: origin stories of their creative concepts, what it was like to work together, production challenges and creative solutions.

Festival screenings are for audiences to enjoy, to build a project’s pedigree and fan base. Festival parties are for fun and celebration (and, of course, PR — with an eye to driving sales later). Critics don’t critique market product (that is, until it is ready to hit the marketplace — and thus relevant to filmgoers). As a matter of fact, in the case of the American Film Market at least, press is actually excluded from all screenings (though, they are welcome to cover the educational conferences and rest of the event’s business). A rough-hewn oversimplification of press activity, then, might be that critics review the art at festivals while reporters cover the business from the market floors.

Many distributors scout festivals not so much to watch the films but rather to watch the audience’s reactions to those films they are prospecting. Setting aside their own personal, subjective opinions, if a distributor likes the audience’s reception to what’s playing and thinks she might be able to sell it, she might duck out into the lobby — even just fifteen minutes into a promising screening — to make a pre-emptive bid.

Kevin Iwashina, Managing Partner of Preferred Content, a film, television, and digital sales, finance and advisory company, explains:

Film festivals offer already curated product, so the artistic reviews, critical response, publicity representation and consumer press are the most important parts of that process. In a market environment, it’s a different kind of awareness, more focused on trade publications.

Festivals are sponsored by local film groups, independent theater chains, online platforms, and local non-profits. They are often funded by ticket sales and sometimes grants or public funds. Markets, on the other hand, are paid for by sponsors targeting the industry players; the players themselves, exhibiting their wares to peers, platforms and other territories, not to mention the badge fees of the many attendees hoping to buy access to key decision makers, information and education.

Both markets and festivals tend to have conference components such as panels, workshops, keynote addresses, breakout roundtable discussions, pitch fests, and so on. In addition to the structured educational opportunities offered, real-world epiphanies abound...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List, of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I THE MARKETS
• PART II THE GLOBAL FILM INDUSTRY
• THE FILM MARKETS
• PART III THE WORLDWIDE TELEVISION AND DIGITAL MEDIA BUSINESS
• THE TV MARKETS
• PART IV CO-PRODUCTION MARKETS
• PART V BEFORE: PREPARATION
• PART VI DURING: AT THE MARKET
• PART VII AFTER: FOLLOW-UP
• PART VIII IMPORTANT ANNUAL ANCILLARY EVENTS
• Chapter 28 Top Ten Market-Like Film Festivals ...
• Index