To say that Cannes isn't short of a bob or two is an understatement.
It's everywhere you look in the Riviera resort, from the boutiques selling expensive jewellery and fashions through to the Bentleys, Ferraris and Lamborghinis that cruise the boulevards.
And from the sleek motor yachts that fill the harbour to the over-priced drinks at the seafront cafés.
Yet the most valuable asset in town last week was not a luxury bonnet badge or a look-at-me boat. It was a piece of plastic little bigger than a credit card - and if you wanted one it would set you back a cool £1,500.
These cards are passes to MIPIM, which has for years been the single biggest event for Europe's property, development and investment community. It is even bigger than Cannes' more famous film festival.
To outsiders, MIPIM appears to be a mix of Hello-style glamour or distasteful indulgence, depending on your point of view.
To insiders, it is a tale of four industries: oil-rich kingdoms and republics indulging in vast displays of wealth; continental regions with schemes invented to soak up European Union money; corporates chasing big contracts for their shareholders; and, finally, the industry's footsoldiers - the architects, builders, developers, engineers, surveyors and consultants who actually make these things happen.
While the fatcats may be there to indulge in political ego trips, the footsoldiers are there to do one thing and one thing only: win business.
To them, time is money and they try to pack in meetings from dawn until dusk. Their days end not at over-the-top Champagne parties but with beers and pizzas in backstreet restaurants.
So where does Nottingham fit into all this? And where does MIPIM fit into what Nottingham wants to achieve?
Nottingham has regularly agonised about whether it is right for the city council to use public money to rub shoulders with the brash and flash at any time, never mind a time where it is strapped for cash. And whether, too, Nottingham is really big enough to swim in this kind of exotic company.
In years past, the city council was brave enough to hire a yacht in the harbour as a base for businesses and officials touting for trade.
But the cost of such an apparently ostentatious object - thought to be around £80,000 - is deemed politically unacceptable at a time of cutbacks.
So Team Nottingham now operates on a compromise: the city's presence at MIPIM is funded entirely by the businesses who go to it - even down to buying tickets for the three council officers whose positions make them most relevant to the push for development: planning chief David Bishop, inward investment manager Lorraine Baggs and Mike Taylor, who looks after the city's regeneration zones.
They were there not to help businesses tie down deals but to talk about what Nottingham had to offer and reassure would-be investors that promising proposals would not be strangled by planning red tape.
Once you understand that MIPIM is an event which operates on different levels, the presence of humble provincial cities and the people who work in them begins to make sense. Many English cities were there, some wielding taxpayer budgets which ran into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
As it turns out, there were reasons why Nottingham didn't need to be quite so humble.
When I arrived in Cannes last Tuesday afternoon and went to register at the exhibition, one of the first things I saw was a vast banner promoting Stockholm's victory in awards handed out by the Financial Times to the best business cities in Europe.
It received its award at a ceremony at MIPIM the following morning. Alongside it, receiving no less than four different gongs, was a city called Nottingham. The awards were received by David Bishop. It was the second time in 24 hours he had been accepting plaudits on the city's behalf, Nottingham having earlier been publicly praised in front of an international audience for its decision to get involved in a pilot project launched by UK Regeneration for a new kind of community development.
So Nottingham went to MIPIM with two ready-made headlines which automatically put it on the international stage. It didn't need to brag.
But it could have done. At the Team Nottingham dinner, attended by around 50 guests, David Bishop, gave an overview of the scale of the investment now signed off for Nottingham in the years ahead - the £600 million scheme to extend the tram network, the expansion of the Nottingham Enterprise Zone creating 10,000 jobs across a series of business locations, the £60 million transport interchange at Midland Railway Station, the widening of the A453 to shorten journey times between the city and its airport.
Even individually, these developments are likely to have a significant impact on the local economy. Together, they offer the prospect of once-in-a-lifetime transformational change.
Given a bigger budget, Nottingham could have made much more of a pipeline of large-scale developments which, frankly, other cities were only dreaming of. When business budgets are tight and council spending under colossal pressure, wielding a big marketing budget may be impossible.
But there must be some technologically smart ways of getting across a message about assets which even some of the big-buck Russian republics couldn't brag about.
Arguing about whether Nottingham should spend money on the lap of luxury is an irrelevance; it doesn't. By the standards of MIPIM in particular and Cannes generally, Team Nottingham is a budget airline production.
Even the old fuss about whether it's right to put £80,000 into a yacht for four days misunderstands the way MIPIM works. When you put a four-day event attended by more than 15,000 people together with an expensive location, space is at a physical and financial premium.
The reason why Cannes harbour is chock full of yachts is that they have been brought in to act as what is - by MIPIM standards - competitively-priced meeting space. It's that or an apartment or hotel. The stands at MIPIM are eye-wateringly expensive, offer little private meeting space for a lot of money and can't be used for evening functions. This is why you see people straining to hear each other in crowded cafés and restaurants, even holding meetings on park benches on the seafront.
Hotels on the Boulevard de la Croisette, Cannes' main drag, have become very wise to people camping out in their lobbies for free (in some you can't get through the door without a MIPIM pass).
So hiring a yacht is neither as daft nor as profligate as it sounds.
For politicians, it may still be too difficult to explain a yacht at MIPIM to someone in The Meadows. But the benefits to the city are easier to quantify. It is fact that several Nottingham businesses came away with contracts, strong leads, relationships with people they had probably not managed to get in front of before.
It is fact, too, that even by international standards, Nottingham had an impressive investment story to tell. In that sense, modest reality trumped some of the multi-million dreamshows. The challenge for Team Nottingham is where it goes from here. Does it get bigger, and if it does where will the budget come from? Or can it tell an impressive story in a smart, cost-effective and technically sexy way?
A city of Nottingham's size and scope should be at an event like MIPIM. But it doesn't have to play the luxury card, and it doesn't have to be like everyone else.
It can and should think different.
Source:www.thisisnottingham.co.uk