Selling TV, or Crack?

The buzz at NATPE is Internet, Internet, Internet, but there’s still interest in buying and selling old fashioned television series.

Don’t believe it? Just sit in one of the comfy sofa pods scattered across the concourse of the Mandalay Bay Events Center, as I did Wednesday.

Soon, a professionally dressed young man sat down.

“Buying or selling?” he asked quietly, rather like a covert drug seller. He seemed turned off by my answer (“Covering!”) and moved on to pitch others in the pod before I got more than his first name, Preston. He’s graduating from Babson College in Illinois and is the associate producer of CEO Intern, according to the glossy postcard he handed me. “Five students. One willing business. An 8-week takeover. And the footage to prove it all” is the pitch.

The producers have convinced one of the oldest commercial cryogenics processing companies (cryogenics is the science of improving metals to make them last longer, not the practice of freezing people) to allow the interns to work as “group CEO” with an MBA candidate supervising their financial decisions.

By the end of his pitch, Preston had gotten a contact number from a woman in the seating pod who said she was from BET.

And he didn’t even have to set up a booth.

Of course, most of the pitch activity is on the NATPE exhibition area. If the floor were a country, then FremantleMedia North America (marketing titles like Project Runway and Inconoclasts from Sundance Channel); Warner Brothers (touting Ellen and Two-and-a-Half Men), CBS Paramount International Distribution (Oprah, Dexter, Californication) and NBC Universal (Law & Order, Top Chef) are the major urban centers, based on their booth size. Distributors like Carsey Werner International (Cosby, That 70s Show) and Granada (Hell’s Kitchen, The Kylie Show) would be the suburbs. The rest of the floor is the fly-over states, begging for some of the 7,000 delegates to drop in for a pitch about shows like Comedy Pet Theater or The Clever Cleaver Brothers (a cooking show, attention to which benefited from good both placement adjacent to FremantleMedia and eye-catching, red and black plaid suits. Bad sartorial choice, good marketing, I guess.)

Given the expansion of low-cost Internet production by young, hungry filmmakers, one could have been forgiven if attendees though a plethora of them had opted to attend NATPE.

The morning trudge to the Events Center by suited, Blackberry-glued execs was joined by hoodie-wearing, ballcap-topped dudes and dudettes. Wrong assumption, though; they were headed to the SnowSports convention downstairs from NATPE. And at night, they looked a lot happier, with their roll-aboards full of swag, than the will-I-have-a-TV-job-next-year programmers.

Of course, it could have just been the free beer….