The most serious buyer evaluation happens in the quiet weeks after MIPCOM, when screeners finally get watched and most sales teams have stopped looking. Don't miss the window.
The Friday after MIPCOM has a particular feeling. The team lands back from Nice, voices gone, inboxes overflowing. There's a debrief on Monday: meetings counted, business cards logged, the CRM dutifully updated. The follow-up emails go out in a wave, great to see you, as discussed, sending everything over, and then, gradually, the company exhales. The market is "done". Attention turns to delivery schedules, the Q4 push, London Screenings planning.
Meanwhile, something important is happening quietly on the other side of the business, and almost nobody is watching it.
The buyers have gone home too. And now, for the first time in weeks, they have what they never had in Cannes: time. Time to actually watch the screeners they were pitched in fifteen-minute increments. Time to revisit the title that stuck in their mind from a Tuesday meeting they took between four others. Time to share a link with the colleague whose opinion they need, to download the materials, to build the internal case. The market week was for collecting; the weeks after are for evaluating.
This is the great mismatch of the market cycle: buyer attention peaks after the event, at precisely the moment distributor attention collapses. The meeting at the Palais wasn't the peak of interest. It was the midpoint. Treating the flight home as the finish line means leaving the most decisive phase of the market unwatched.
In our experience across distribution platforms, the pattern repeats every cycle. Screening activity doesn't fall off a cliff when the Palais closes, serious viewing, the deep and complete watches that signal genuine evaluation, clusters in the days and weeks afterwards. New names from buyer companies appear on titles their colleague met you about, the surest sign a programme is being discussed internally. Assets get downloaded, which buyers do when they're preparing to argue for something, not when they're idly curious. And some buyers who were warm in the meeting go silent on the platform, which is a signal too, just not the one their handshake suggested.
Every one of these is a follow-up instruction, far more specific than anything in the meeting notes. And they're perishable. The buyer who watched 80% of your screener on the Thursday after the market is at their warmest that week, comparing you, in all likelihood, against two competitors they also met. Reach them while the evaluation is live and you're part of it. Discover the signal in a quarterly report in December and you're reading the post-mortem.
The standard post-market follow-up is built on the meeting: who we saw, what was said, what we promised to send. Necessary, but it's only half the picture, and it treats every buyer identically at the exact moment their behaviour has started to differentiate them sharply. The stronger model adds a second pass, built on what buyers actually did next:
The deep watcher. A buyer screened a title seriously after the market, follow up on that title, specifically and personally, while they're still in it. Not the generic slate recap. A note that says, in effect, you're evaluating this; here's what helps: availability, related titles, the materials their internal case needs.
The spreading account. New colleagues from a buyer appearing on a title means an internal conversation has started. Your job is to arm your champion, the person you met, with whatever carries that conversation: screeners for the others, the sales sheet, the commercial detail.
The wanderer. The buyer who came home from Cannes and browsed somewhere unexpected in your catalogue is showing you a brief the meeting never surfaced. Follow their interest, not your agenda.
The gone-quiet. Warm in the meeting, invisible since. Don't bombard them, but don't deceive yourself either. The absence of behaviour is information, and it should shape where the team's limited follow-up energy goes.
Run this way, the fortnight after MIPCOM becomes what it actually is: the highest-leverage selling window of the quarter, when intent is visible, fresh and acted on by almost none of your competitors, because their teams, like most, stopped looking when the stand came down.
Across this series we've followed the cycle: getting the screening room ready before Cannes, resisting the blanket slate blast, walking into meetings knowing the buyer, building outreach on behaviour rather than guesswork, and now, staying switched on through the weeks when the real evaluation happens. The thread through all five is the same. MIPCOM isn't a week in October. It's a season that runs from late summer to mid-November, and the distributors who win it are the ones paying attention for all of it, especially the parts where the buyer can't see them trying.
Every buyer who watched, searched, returned and downloaded this season left you a precise record of what they actually think. The only question is whether your team can see it, and what they'll do next.
ONE shows distribution teams exactly what buyers did before, during and after every market, so follow-up lands while interest is live. Book a discovery call.