By Julianna Cummins and Etan Vlessing 

If you want to stay successful, stay flexible, stay agile and look abroad – and don’t ignore the emerging markets.

That was some of the wisdom doled out by IM Global CEO and founder Stuart Ford on Saturday at the TIFF industry conference day dedicated to financing. With a heavy emphasis on exploiting business opportunities in emerging markets, the day’s sessions urged producers to look outside the traditional North American markets for their films.

Michael Gubbins, founder of the U.K.-based consultancy SampoMedia and chair of Fflim Cymru Wales (the film agency for Wales), also pushed filmmakers to think outside the box in his Sunday session, by suggesting that arthouse films are really just genre pics that can be marketed to specific audiences.

Here, an overview of some highlights from the weekend sessions:

Working abroad

In the Saturday’s opening session, Ford said his film financing, sales and distribution company has remained viable because of its commitment to working in markets outside of the U.S.

For example, several years ago the company decided to dedicate a portion of its business model to increasing its profits from the Asian market. IM Global set up an office in Beijing and staffed it with local executives, as well as personnel from the company’s North American and European offices. The company then determined where it could find its niche in the Chinese market, such as building up the library of rights to Hollywood movies that can distributed in the region.

“As the library revenues grow there significantly, we will find ourselves sitting on an increasingly expanding asset,” Ford said. “We have quite quickly been able to make ourselves a very relevant and very useful player.”

The company has also increased its focus on selling the international rights to films in emerging markets such as South East Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America to break away from the over-saturated U.S. market. He noted the traditional strategy was to focus on the U.S., and sell international rights to mitigate risk.

“The truth is, if you look at that at a completely objective level, it doesn’t make a lot of sense because the U.S. distribution market is the most crowded and expensive, and therefore the most unreliable, in the world,” Ford said.

Chasing unicorns in China

The numbers alone are a compelling case to get into the Chinese market, as FilmNation Entertainment’s Rob Carney demonstrated in his presentation on Saturday. The compounded annual growth rate for the North American box office over the past five years sits at just under 1%, Carney noted, while the compounded annual growth rate for Chinese box office over the past five years is about 35%.

Still, he noted that the only real opportunities for producers in China are to make a Chinese film to be released in China, or to sell international movies into the Chinese market. “Coproductions are a bit of a unicorn – they don’t really exist,” Carney quipped.

Arthouse as genre

Also Sunday, Michael Gubbins, founder of SampoMedia and chair of Ffilm Cymru Wales, led a panel on audience building at Telefilm Canada’s Talent to Watch series at the Glenn Gould Studio. A counter-intuitive Gubbins warned filmmakers against concluding arthouse films are not genre pics, and cited French films as an example, which are distinct from U.K. or North American English-language movies.

“[When] I watch those films, I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to see a good-looking middle-aged woman, I know it’s not going to have a happy ending and I know it will be slightly depressing. And I’m going to love it,” Gubbins told the TIFF industry audience.

Why? “It’s a genre all its own.”

Gubbins said arthouse film fans and festival-goers are in “self-selected communities” that filmmakers can target. “Going to where you know people exist is such an obvious way to build a community. I don’t know why everyone isn’t doing it. But they’re not.”

That will change, however, as filmmakers inevitably jump to the VOD space, where video audiences are increasingly collecting, especially around Netflix.

“Netflix is a fantastic service because it’s so cheap and it’s easy to use,” he argued.

And Netflix is changing the way people watch movies, while filmmakers are stuck in the past when the local cinema ruled.

“Anyone who believes that sticking something on an online platform with no cinematic release, and has no other form of marketing, and that somehow people will find it and that’s how the long tail works, is dreaming,” Gubbins said. “It cannot be a consolation prize. On-demand will be the main way people access films.”

The winning strategy is to engage potential consumers of your movie, on top of just letting them know a film is available in the market.

“That means audience building, that means rather than how many audience members can I reach, it means how can I engage them,” Gubbins argued.