I never did go to the NAB Show when I was a position to do so. Many of my peers at more liberally budgeted companies would get to go to the mid-spring confab in Las Vegas for “support”–which was at the time code for “you’re doing a bang-up job, take your significant other and enjoy Vegas on us”. My employers were far less generous–pretty much in line with the way they budgeted my department. I worked for people who championed the “quarter system”–do everything our top competitors were doing with one-fourth the staff and one-fourth the investment. I’m well aware it contributed to my longevity in the long run, but I will cop to being more than a tad envious of those that were so rewarded while I spend another ho-hum day in the office–you know, back in an era when people actually did that.
My colleagues who did attend would try and ease my pain by bringing back the show dailies and pointing out that the majority of exhibitors were hawking hardware to help stations run more efficiently and that while some of the top decision-makers were indeed present for those reasons, most of the other attendees were the guys who didn’t wear suits–mostly engineers and tech support personnel. The sales executives who were in attendance would repeatedly be dismissive of the sorts of dinner conversations they were forced to have with whom they saw as naive uninformed drones. They would attempt to assure me that I wasn’t missing out on that much–dismissive of the fact that I considered the $100 Wagyu steak dinner and a spa massage they were allowed to expense as a more than ample trade-off for their troubles. They’d counter that the panels were overwhelmingly boring and, as they’d explain, “appealing only to the true nerds”. Which I guess for someone who would otherwise self-identify as one (if not a geek) was a backhanded compliment.
But that was in an era where NATPE and similar content-focused gatherings were all the rage, and as you hopefully read earlier this month that era is now dead and buried. We’re also now in a time where those who are the more tech-savvy are all the more valued and job-secure. Those big whigs who would otherwise headline NATPE panels now are in need of another pulpit at a media-dense event to pontificate from. And it would appear that the rostrum from the just-completed NAB ’26 reflected that sort of seismic shift where the “nerds” now have the chance to actually learn about areas that historically weren’t in their lane.
How else does one explain why this year’s attendees were treated to a deep dive into the horror genre, which TV TECH’s Jenny Priestley shared these nuggest from:
In 2025, horror movies made almost $1 billion at the U.S. domestic box office, proving that the genre is alive and well, even if some of its characters aren’t.Much of this is due to the collective experience, according to Michael Clear, president of production company Atomic Monster. “Everyone is kind of driven by watching media alone. But I think horror movies are an opportunity to go on a ride with a group of people,” Clear told the audience at “The Scary-Smart Business of Horror” panel.
“M3GAN” screenwriter Akela Cooper revealed that when writing the movie’s script, she began to think of her character as one of the most iconic horror movie characters of all time…“I then started thinking of ‘M3GAN’ kind of like ‘Jaws.’ Famously, they could not get that shark to work, so then they had to fill around it. You saw it in bits and pieces. So in the sequence where M3GAN is chasing the bully through the woods, I wrote that you only see her in certain spots, very, very quickly. It was kind of like a shark on land hunting this little boy.”
Or what her colleague Victoria Martinez shared about a look into the mindset of a “cable” news afficiando:
The future of news is not just about distribution but about building deeper, more direct relationships with audiences wherever they are….That was the message of the session “The MS NOW Playbook: Building Community Across Platforms…They said MS NOW’s independence — after NBCUniversal spun the former MSNBC and most of its other basic-cable networks into Versant in January — has become a strategic advantage…That shift has allowed the company to invest in areas it had not prioritized before, particularly digital products and audience engagement.
Or getting the chance to hear first-hand about what is arguably the most pressing issue in the broadcast inudstry today from the gentleman statistically most likely to employ any of them, as DEADLINE’s Dade Hayes reported: In his first public comments since a federal judge blocked Nexstar’s merger with Tegna, Nexstar CEO Perry Sook took aim at DirecTV, one of the opponents mobilizing against the $6.2 billion deal.
“The idea that anyone, Nexstar included, would be a ‘broadcast behemoth’ – to me, that term is kind of an oxymoron, given who we compete against,” Sook told Inside Edition host Debra Norville in a one-on-one conversation Tuesday at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. Amazon, Google and Meta, he added, “are multitrillion-dollar companies. Even DirecTV, which is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, is twice the size of us. So [saying] we’re the ‘behemoth throwing our weight around in this marketplace’ doesn’t really reflect the reality.”
Does this all sound dumbed-down and tech-oriented to you? If anything, this year’s NAB attendees have been exposed to a lot more diverse array of topics amd pressing matters than what I was at literally dozens of NATPEs. And that especially includes the newly monickered “data scientists” who now occupy a majority of the positions folks like moi used to.
Moreover, I continue to be evangelical about the necessity to be in the same place at the same time with actual decision-makers if one has any hope of career advancement–or even stability. I’m fully aware that in a city like Las Vegas distractions and diversions are the order of the day, but I know from my own experiences that being able to do a walk-and-talk and/or an elevator pitch while en route to and from the convention center is a far better way to have someone of consequence know you’re a hot commodity worthy of a follow-yp. It’s a lot easier for opportunity to knock when there’s no actual door in the way. And that truth is all the more self-evident in an era where, as I’ve previously lamented, Zooms and LinkedIn are poor and often misleading substitutes for the human experience of connection.
I especially miss such connection on days like this after enduring one of the more frustrating and humiliating days yet in the world I am now forced to exist in. There are few worse feelings one can have than to be considered irrelevant and worthless. As I write this, I’ve rarely felt more so. I so wish I had a convention to go to. Or anywhere safe and opportunistic, for that matter.
So to those of you who may have at one time been the source of undeserved mocking and derision–wow, I am SO sorry. You have my respect and envy. From one “nerd” to “another”.
Until next time…