NATPE Should Spin Off A Broadcast Show

Midway through the three-and-a-half day TV programming conference at Miami’s Fontainebleau resort this week, NATPE reported that attendance was up 22% to more than 4,500, a nice reversal of years of decline.

Along with the numbers, NATPE President Rick Feldman put out a statement saying he was pleased with the upswing. “The general buzz of people doing business throughout the resort — from the lobby, to the suites, to the cabanas overlooking the ocean — has been very gratifying.”

The key word there may be “general” because it helps to mask some very specific buzz — kvetching would be a better word — about the 40-minute elevator lines at the Fontainebleau’s Tresor Tower, where a lot of key companies had rented expensive suites. Clients were stacked up in the lobby like jets at LaGuardia during the snow storm.

Here’s our horror story: On Monday morning, our reporter Diana Marszalek climbed 22 flights of stairs to Debmar-Mercury’s suite for an interview with Jeremy Kyle, the British import who will be hosting a conflict show this fall. She arrived at the appointed hour, but Kyle didn’t because of the elevators. (No doubt ex-Marine and ex-cop Steve Wilkos would have charged up those stairs.)

Given the chronic troubles with elevators at THEhotel in Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay, the site of the past several conferences, you would have thought that NATPE would have taken whatever steps necessary to avoid repeating them in the new venue. You would have thought.

The elevator backup was no mere inconvenience; it was a serious disruption of the business that had brought the 4,500-plus to Miami.

But despite the elevators, I think I have to agree with Feldman. The “general buzz” was good, particularly among the people I care about, domestic syndicators and broadcasters, the readers of TVNewsCheck. Meetings were held, deals were done and ideas exchanged.

The syndicators soon figured a way around the elevators, moving into other towers or into poolside cabanas. That’s where I found CBS Television Distribution’s John Nogawski on Monday afternoon. He was happy to be outside, even though it was a tad breezy and cool.

The grand lobby of the Fontainebleau proved to be a wonderful meeting place, a real hub where sooner or later you would see everybody in attendance. Bars and restaurants were often overwhelmed, but the smart set discovered that you could easily stroll next door to the Eden Roc for sustenance.

Frankly, I don’t know what most of the 4,500 were doing at NATPE. Judging from some of the many receptions I didn’t attend and the thickest and slickest of the magazines distributed, a lot of them were from Latin America.

But somewhere within the larger conference was a smaller one about domestic broadcast syndication and broadcasting.

With the exception of Sony, which has forever abandoned NATPE for reasons we need not go into here, all the important  syndicators were in Miami to entertain, solidify relationships and to sell. And there were a good number of TV broadcasters, station and station group types, nearly 300 by NATPE’s Tuesday count.

This broadcasting sub-conference included several sessions, notably panels featuring top broadcast executives and syndication executives. Many of the broadcasters hung around after the broadcast executive panel for a reception hosted by TVNewsCheck and Rentrak on Tuesday afternoon.

There was even bona fide programming news at NATPE. Debmar-Mercury said that it would test a new daily talk show featuring Father Alberto Cutie this summer on Fox stations in several markets, including New York and Los Angeles.

Cutie is an interesting guy. As a Roman Catholic priest, he built a following of millions on Spanish-language radio and TV with his spiritual advice. But in 2009, he left the church after a tabloid revealed (with pictures on a beach) that he had a girlfriend. Cutie subsequently married the woman and signed on with the Episcopalians.

Debmar-Mercury bills him as “Father Oprah,” but he told me his show would be more like Dr. Phil. “This is a show about human experiences,” he said. “It will be like an open counseling session.”

CBS said that it had cleared its dating show, Excused, in 80% of the county (and 46 of the top 50 markets) and wanted to announce that it was moving ahead with The Lawyers, a legal companion to The Doctors. But the key to the panel show are the NBC O&Os, and management there is still not settled enough to do any kind of deal.

Warner Bros. Domestic Television showed off its prize talent, Anderson Cooper, who will be starring in a talk show starting this fall and making a claim to being Oprah’s replacement.

Which all raises the question of why NATPE doesn’t break out the domestic syndication and local broadcast programming into its own mini-conference at some other time and place? The right time may be November, when syndicators and broadcasters begin to think seriously about the following fall. The right place would be anywhere other than Vegas. I’d start with New Orleans, the site of the best of the NATPEs.

NATPE has only to look to PromaxBDA for a model. To bring broadcasters back into its orbit, it announced two weeks ago a two-day mini-conference in Las Vegas this June. Six major syndicators — Warner Bros., NBC, Twentieth, CBS, Sony and Debmar-Mercury — have agreed to support the Station Summit in a big way.

This new entry on the broadcast calendar and its attendant broadcast awards for local promotion (PromaxBDALocal) are the product of the considerable energy of PromaxBDA President Jonathan Block-Verk, who was running about the Fontainebleau locking up commitments for the summit.

Right now, PromaxBDA is principally about syndication promotion and creative services, but its second-day conference will address social media and other new revenue opportunities. In other words, it creeps into general broadcasting issues.

If I were Feldman, I’d be worrying that PromaxBDA is moving in on my turf.

And, of course, I’d also be worrying about elevators.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be reached at 9730791-1067 or [email protected]. You can read his other columns here.