Every distributor blasts every buyer with the full slate before MIPCOM, and buyers have stopped reading. Here's how sharper, buyer-specific selections win the meetings that matter.
Somewhere around late August, an email goes out from every distribution company in the business. The subject line says something like "Our MIPCOM 2026 Slate" and the body contains everything: the hero drama, the returning formats, the factual strand, the kids' block, forty titles, one link, sent to the entire buyer database.
It feels like work. It looks like marketing. And it has a problem that nobody on the sending side ever sees: the buyer receiving it got thirty of these this week. They are a commissioning editor with two acquisition slots for the autumn and a very specific brief, and they have just been handed a haystack by every distributor in the market simultaneously.
So they do what any of us would do. They skim the first three titles, recognise nothing relevant, and archive it. Your hero drama, which might genuinely be perfect for them, died in position fourteen of a list that was never built for them in the first place.
This is the slate trap: the belief that sending more content to more buyers creates more interest, when in practice it does the opposite. Attention is the scarcest resource in the pre-market window, and the full-catalogue blast spends it on volume rather than relevance. Worse, it trains your buyers that your emails can be safely ignored, a tax you keep paying long after Cannes.
Talk to acquisition people about the pre-MIPCOM period and a consistent picture emerges. They are not browsing for pleasure. They have briefs, a gap in the Saturday schedule, a streamer mandate for returnable factual formats, a co-production budget that needs a partner. They are scanning everything that lands against that brief, fast, and discarding ruthlessly.
A forty-title slate email asks the buyer to do the matching themselves. A five-title selection, chosen because you know what they're looking for, does the matching for them. One of these gets read. In our experience across distribution platforms, the difference in engagement between a generic blast and a genuinely targeted selection isn't marginal, it's the difference between being skimmed and being screened.
And the maths of it should change how you think about effort. The blast takes an afternoon and reaches a thousand inboxes. The targeted selection takes your salesperson twenty minutes per buyer, but it lands with the fifty buyers who actually drive your revenue, and it lands as a message from a person who knows them rather than a campaign from a system that doesn't.
If you take one structural change into this MIPCOM cycle, make it this: treat the slate announcement and the buyer outreach as two different jobs.
The slate announcement is brand work. It can go wide, look beautiful, and live on your platform as the definitive collection. Fine. But the outreach that wins meetings is built per buyer, and it follows three rules.
Select against the buyer, not the slate. Before anything is sent, the question is not "what are we pushing?" but "what is this buyer trying to solve?" Their last acquisitions, what they told you in May, what they screened on your platform recently, that's the brief. Three to six titles against it. If a priority title doesn't fit their brief, leaving it out is not a failure of campaign discipline; it's the reason the email gets read.
Send it from a person. A curated link from a named salesperson, with two lines on why these titles and why now, outperforms any designed campaign template. Buyers buy from people. The platform's job is to make the screening effortless once the person has earned the click.
Time it for the diary, not the deadline. The targeted send works hardest three to five weeks out, when buyers are building their Cannes meeting lists and deciding who gets an hour. Send it the week before the market and you're confirming meetings; send it in early September and you're creating them.
Here's the counterintuitive part, and it matters most with your biggest buyers: sometimes the strongest move is to send less, or nothing at all.
Your most valuable relationships are also the most over-mailed, by you and by every competitor. A major streamer's acquisitions team is drowning. If you've already sent them a tailored selection and they haven't engaged, a second and third send doesn't create attention; it erodes the credibility of the next thing you send. The discipline of holding back, and waiting until you have something genuinely relevant to say, is what keeps your name worth opening.
Which raises the obvious question: how do you know what's relevant? How do you know what a buyer is actually looking for, beyond what they said in a meeting six months ago?
Often, they've already told you, not in an email, but in what they've been quietly watching, searching for and downloading on your platform. That behaviour is the best brief you'll ever get, and it's the subject of the next piece in this series: what great sales teams know before they sit down at MIPCOM.
ONE gives distribution teams a single platform to build buyer-specific selections, screen securely, and see exactly what each buyer engaged with. Book a discovery call.