The Swedish talent show Minimello, pitched to the international TV market with that description, is one of thousands of new television formats being showcased at the annual TV sales market Mipcom.

Although they all start to look and sound the same after a while sometimes it is something as simple as a cardboard toilet tube that can give one show the edge in a crowded market.

Or, in Minimello's case, some 35,000 of them, which the Swedish TV viewing public has turned into cardboard puppets and sent in to the show. They are then featured either as the show's audience or performers.

The series launched in 2010 in Sweden and is, to be fair, pitched at kids. But it has become a hit, drawing more than one million votes every week in a country with a population of only 10 million.

Mipcom - or more formally Marche International des Programmes de Communication - is one of the key annual markets for buying TV content, with around 12,000 attendees trawling through programs from some 1700 exhibitors in Cannes, France.

The biggest players, including US studios such as Warner Bros, CBS, ABC and 20th Century Fox, are here, as well as key Australian, British and European production houses, showcasing their wares in the Palais des Festivals.

There is a single objective: finding, and buying, the next big thing.

Though the market does not formally open until late Monday night, Australian time, there are already clear signs it will be buoyant, in part off the back of Netflix's launching into six European countries, including France and Germany, last month.

Executives tend to outnumber stars at Mipcom by a factor of as much as a thousand to one, but that does not stop a slew of big names sailing into town to help studios and production companies push their wares.

British talent show svengali Simon Cowell is here, as well as TV chef Jamie Oliver and the iconic rock star Gene Simmons, who is promoting his new talent format, Coliseum, from the US production company Sierra/Engine Television.

Simmons said his show would upend the traditional talent show by getting real with its subjects.

"We want to open the trap doors of life and get tough," he said. "There will be heartbreak, and people are going to cry and their dreams will be shattered, just like in real life."

The actor and Wild Things adventurer Dominic Monaghan is here to promote his new series, The 100 Code, a crime thriller about a New York cop sent to Sweden to help with a gruesome murder investigation.

And the model and actress Elizabeth Hurley is here, launching the aristocratic soap opera, The Royals in which she stars.

The "showrunner" producers Steven Moffat (Doctor Who) and M. Night Shymalan are also here. Shymalan is launching his new US series Wayward Pines.

Australian actress Nicky Whelan is here, promoting the US soccer drama Matador.

And another Australian, actress Frances O'Connor, is here to promote a new crime thriller, The Missing, from the UK's All3Media.

There is also a handful of keynote speakers, including James Murdoch, Simon Cowell and Netflix boss Ted Sarandos, the production and distribution bosses from US network CBS David Stapf and Armando Nunez, and Charles Zhang, the head of the Chinese streaming site Sohu.