There’s a lot riding on how events unfold in the mountains of Banff this coming June. Not that the organizers of the newly minted Banff World Television Festival will admit it, but it’s true.

Following the highly publicized bankruptcy of the festival’s umbrella foundation just weeks before Banff’s 25th edition last year – and its ultimately successful, if at times creaking, execution – the stakes are certainly high for Banff 2005, set to unspool June 12-15.

But if Robert Montgomery, the festival’s CEO, is feeling the pressure, he’s not showing any overt signs. Over lunch in Toronto’s Little Italy, Montgomery is relaxed and focused only on what he is sure will be a new chapter in Banff’s distinguished history.

‘It’s the first year that we have really been responsible for the event and the outcome of the event,’ he says. ‘So we consider that important. But more important is building the festival into what it needs to be for the Canadian industry.’

To that end, Montgomery and his team at Achilles Media, the event management company that took over amidst the bankruptcy turmoil of 2004, have revamped the festival from top to bottom – everything from creating new signage to reformatting the program schedule.

‘Where great television is born’

In addition to rebranding the festival and creating a new logo, there is also a new tagline: ‘Where great television is born.’ These new identifiers were conceived by Toronto marketing firm GJP Advertising.

‘It was time to refresh the brand and the look,’ says Mongomery. ‘The previous one had been around for several years, and there was a view that it was time… to move forward in the market with a new look that updates where we’re at and reflects what the festival is.’

But the changes are far more fundamental than new logos and taglines.

Gone are the theme days devoted to kids programming, documentaries and fiction and gone is the annual Great Canadian Barbeque. The festival has also been scaled back to run just three full days, Monday to Wednesday, with Sunday devoted largely to a golf tournament and rookie programs.

Central to the new focus is a series of peer-to-peer sessions in which producers and commissioning editors can prebook meetings – with each other or their counterparts from other countries – for a quick sit-down. The new stream of meetings flows from what has long been a signature feature of Banff: pairing producers and broadcasters. To that end, the festival will continue to offer its Take a Decision Maker to Breakfast and Take a Decision Maker to Lunch streams.

The festival has also expanded the delegate lounge, now located in the much larger Van Horne Ballroom of the Fairmont Banff Springs hotel convention center, to include what is being dubbed the Banff Marketplace, which will include exhibit booths in addition to mailboxes and seating areas.

The festival will put a greater emphasis on TV shows, with screenings integrated right into the schedule. There is also the opening charity golf tournament, with proceeds going to the Stephen Lewis Foundation, and a more-low-key closing-night party.

Back this year will be the festival’s signature pitching sessions, including the International Market Simulation, CTV Documart and New Players Pitch sessions. Also on tap will be the usual array of panel discussions and master classes.

‘There’s no event globally dedicated to television content creation more important than Banff,’ says Montgomery. ‘Our job is to provide the festival with long-term stability… to evolve it and take it to the next level.’

This time last year that evolution was anything but assured.

In April 2004, news broke that the Banff Television Foundation, the organization that ran the festival along with a handful of other international events including nextMedia and the World Congress of History Producers, had filed for bankruptcy protection in a Calgary court.

The news sent shockwaves through the industry as stakeholders, many of whom had already paid to attend Banff, wondered whether the festival would survive to celebrate its silver jubilee.

One of the issues Montgomery and his team have been dealing with over the last 12 months is clarifying that the financial problems were not with the festival itself but rather the foundation that ran the festival. As it turns out, those problems stemmed from other events such as Newsworld, a now-defunct international current events fest.

Yet to say that all was well with the festival would be misleading. Much of the luster was off Banff by the time the silver anniversary rolled around last year. There were widely heard complaints that the festival was getting too big and too expensive, and that access to top international players was increasingly hard to get because they were either too busy or not coming.

‘Some companies had drifted away a bit; were less interested in sending key people, senior executives. They weren’t seeing the value of it because it wasn’t evident in the results,’ says Norm Bolen, EVP programming at Alliance Atlantis and a member of the Banff Television Foundation board of directors.

‘It was certainly a fun event and there was a lot of networking that went on. But a lot of the key players from the States and Europe stopped coming. And there is only one reason to stop coming to these events, and that is because they are not serving [attendees’] interests as well as they should.’

According to Breakthrough Films & Television executive producer Ira Levy, one of the problems was that the festival, which in 2003 boasted 1,800 participants, was getting too large but was continuing to function as it had when it was a much smaller event.

‘You had either of two ways to go: shrink down the size and have it as a more intimate festival, or adapt the content to accommodate more participants,’ he says. But maintaining the event much as it had been for 20 years while charging participants more money was clearly becoming a problem, Levy says.

And so it became incumbent on the festival to either reinvent itself or risk becoming irrelevant to the industry both in Canada and around the world.

Much of the changes come on the heels of consultations since last year with stakeholders, including a third-party survey. This research concluded that the industry wanted the focus directed at the international market and for the festival to provide better value for the money, Montgomery says.

‘The most important thing is to have the right people there and exposing them to the right opportunities and delivering a tremendous value to them in terms of the experience,’ he says.

‘We want to have the right international broadcasters there engaging with our industry. That’s our main goal.’

With that in mind, Banff has worked hard to assure that many of the top commissioning editors from the U.S. and Europe come to this year’s festival. Among those confirmed are representatives from Channel 4, U.K.; BBC, U.K.; RTI, Italy; SVT, Sweden; National Geographic Television & Film, U.S.; and PBS, U.S.

Rookies in the Rockies

Like many of the world’s most successful brands – Nike, Disney, McDonald’s – built on a youth demographic that then theoretically translates into lifelong brand loyalties, Banff has put an emphasis on attracting young TV professionals. This year Banff has partnered with the National Screen Institute-Canada in a new pitching workshop, that will provide a day of training on June 12 to aspiring producers, and the chance to pitch ideas to a panel of international commissioning editors. There will also be a rookie orientation session that day, and the festival has introduced an all-inclusive rookie rate of $1,000.

How well all these changes translate into a successful festival remains to be seen. With the cloud of the bankruptcy hanging over Banff in 2004, most attendees cut the festival a lot of slack. Just having a Banff Television Festival was seen as a significant accomplishment.

This year will be different.

‘I think this year is a show-me year,’ says Bolen. ‘The industry is saying, ‘OK. We’re giving you the benefit of the doubt. We’re supporting you. We’re sending people. We’re there. Now show us that it’s going to be worth our investment of effort and money.’

‘I think a lot is at stake. It’s very important that Banff gets really high ratings this year from the users, and I’m sure it will.’

-www.banff2005.com