It may be April Fool’s Day, but I’m in anything but a laughing mood today. That’s because I received this sobering story via THE WRAP’s Tess Patton yesterday afternoon:
Brunico Communications will shutter its U.S. television events business in 2027, including its NATPE conventions as well as its Kidscreen and Reelscreen Summits…The events organizer cited media content budgets and market consolidation as the primary reasons for shutting down the events programs. Brunico will shift its focus to its publications, including Realscreen, Kidscreen, Playback and Strategy.
Brunico called the U.S. events shut down a “difficulty, but necessary devision.”…“This decision was deeply considered and stemmed from the market consolidation that continues to progress and have structural impacts on the content production business,” Brunico Communications president and CEO Russell Goldstein said in a statement…Brunico acquired NATPE — the National Association of Television Programming Executives — in 2023 after the organization declared bankruptcy post-pandemic. The communications company purchased NATPE Global, NATPE Budapest, NATPE Streaming+ and the Brandon Tartikoff Legacy Awards.
You read that right. A conglomerate buys a legacy brand only to quickly decide to shut it down and extract from its carcass whatever ROI-friendly remnants can be salvaged, leaving the people involved with nothing but memories of better days. Falling right in line with just about everything going on in media these days. Just ask anyone who might have been working for Tegna or CBS News, to name just two recent examples.
Granted, the handwriting was most definitely on the wall. That silly little speed bump called COVID prevented NATPE from being held for the two years at the outset of this decade, setting up the scenario for Brunico to acquire distressed assets at a discount. I was especially upset about the second of those two, especially at a time when I had the financial wherewithal to have actually attended. I mused about it at length then, as longtime readers might recall. But since I know many of you are not, allow me to regurgitate my lament:
(D)ecades ago I would have been likely in a different city, staggering back to my hotel room after a night of celebratory “team building” following the last full day of the NATPE convention. Whether you were part of a team of sellers looking for release after days of preparation, sales drills and intense negotiations in a crowded convention center, or a team of buyers lighting a proverbial victory cigar after having aced out your market competitors for the rights to one of these shows, we all looked forward to what we unashamedly called Numb Nuts Night.
If you emerged from the sales season and your year-end review with a job, and you had meet your quota of dollars booked or markets cleared that you were tasked with announcing at the convention, you got to party in the French Quarter or on a pleasure yacht with your peers and competitors. For a younger version of me, it was one of my first experiences with debauchery on an expense account. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen your boss and his female counterpart at another company simultaneously getting lap dances from the same transsexual dancer while sipping on Cristal that his corporate credit card was paying for. If you turned around, you’d often see the star of a prominent network TV show stumbling into a cab that their manager hastily called after they almost got into a fist fight with an aggressive partier. Welcome to Numb Nuts Night.
NATPE was much more than merely a Caligula’s palace–though the ones that took place in New Orleans often devolved into that. It was an opportunity to come face-to-face with colleagues and clients from all over the country–nay, all over the world. It was an opportunity to see many of them on early morning panels, together struggling to stay awake on chicory-infused coffee. And numerous follow-up opportunities to connect on a deeper level while sprinting to the convention floor. We’d inevitably pass by the press area replete with racks upon racks of special issues of the sorts of trade publications that Brunico inherited, fresh issues of dailies ready for the taking at zero cost. Not only would they provide an instant source of conversation, but they were invaluable reading materials for the arduous and frequently delayes flight home. And all the more meaningful when you’ve just come off of spending some quality time with those being written about.
My more creative colleagues who made Realscreen a habit would often regale us with similar stories of how they were able to staff pilots and presentations in a similar fashion, learning of formats being exported and imported at these conventions well ahead of the sales cycle. They’d also favorably compare their parties to ours, and since they were typically a harder-partier lot we were frequently envious of them.
Ironically, Patton’s story hit while I was on a Zoom call being interviewed for background on a book a one-time colleague of mine is planning to write that focuses around this now apparently forever lost era. I first bonded with this person at a NATPE, at a Super Bowl watch party that my ex-boss was holding in his spacious hotel suite replete with open bar and buffet. It was only on this call yesterday that I realized I was perhaps one of the few persons in attendance that wasn’t sleeping with one of my colleagues of the opposite gender. Perhaps that’s why I actually still recall the details of the game.
And perhaps that’s why I actually feel sorry for the generation that is now running this industry that grew up far more comfortable and experienced with hiding behind a screen than those of mine have. Zooms and virtual gatherings are the future, and while they are unquestionably more cost-efficient they completely take away the experience of human connection. In an era where AI and deepfake are all the more rampant, and LinkedIn is replete with scammers feverishly pressuring saps like moi to take advantage of their “resume consulting” services to break through the seemingly impenetrable walls of HR teams, the demise of in-person gatherings like NATPE and Realscreen are all the more disturbing to folks like myself who used to use them as ways to actually pursue real opportunity.
Maybe that’s why today a lot more parts of my body besides my nuts are numb?
Until next time…
‘