The Tulum meeting room on the main floor of the hotel.
The first MIPCancun (which ended Friday, November 21 at the JW Marriott Hotel in the Mexican resort town) was a great success, at least for the sellers and buyers VideoAge spoke with.
There were a total of 35 distribution companies, each one occupying a table, and 40 buyers, mostly from South America. Originally, the market was promoted as an opportunity to meet buyers from hard-to-reach Central America, who tend not to travel to MIP-TV or MIPCOM, but ultimately it was dominated by Mexico and South America, and there was even one buyer from non-Spanish-speaking Jamaica.
While each exhibitor paid the equivalent of $5,180 for the table and hotel room for two nights, in addition to traveling and other costs (which brought the total cost to some $7,000 per person per company), the buyers were invited expenses paid, including airfare, accommodations and transportation. All participants enjoyed complementary breakfasts and luncheons as part of the market’s networking program.
According to non-official reports, there were some distributors and observers who neither registered nor paid for a table, but met with buyers outside the large Tulum meeting room on the main floor of the hotel.
The Reed MIDEM organizers made sure that buyers didn’t goof off by monitoring their attendance and coordinating a sort of “speed-dating,” where buyers were required to change tables every 25 minutes. In the one and half days of table-hopping, buyers visited — at least in the case of TeleLatino’s Lilly Caputo — 22 sellers.
To Caputo, an Argentinian-born Italian who is the acquisition executive at Canada’s TeleLatino, this first MIPCancun “was well organized and well run,” and she’s looking forward to future editions.
For Bruce Rabinowitz, the New York City-based representative of Italy’s RAICom for the Americas, the event was “beautifully organized and it provided a fantastic opportunity to interact with broadcasters who I don’t ordinarily have enough time to see at the major markets, as well as to meet and get to know new buyers.”
