Big in Brazil

Editorial

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – It feels a little self-involved to write about ourselves in the editorial, but when else can we share the latest about what we’re up to? This month our Print edition has a new format on our cover, a full page photo to reflect the excitement of the 2013 Confederations Cup being held in six cities around Brazil from June 15th – June 30th.

We’ve been trying to find ways to use more photography and this idea actually struck while back in New York last month, picking up a copy of a local community paper in Greenpoint/Williamsburg (Brooklyn). It involved finding just the right photo and we actually paid Getty for an image, something we had never done before either.

Also we managed to get back to 24 pages again, the first time since our February Carnival issue, and used a couple other full page photography-based advertisements to promote our Rio DJ MixUp event in May that Jimmy Buffet showed up to, as well as our new limited edition T-Shirts.

They are ‘limited edition’ in the sense that we are too small to really deal with shipping them anywhere, and it is not really something we can afford to spend time on. So they are limited in the sense of – limited opportunity to get one before they are gone because we are not in the T-Shirt retail business… but they are pretty cool.

We were able to get back to 24 pages because of advertising support, and it reflects the interest in Rio and Brazil this season. Usually June and July get a little sleepy in Rio but not this year, with the Confederations Cup this month and the World Youth Day next month.

Hopefully that will continue as we get into the mega-event period, a time that everyone expects to crescendo until the Olympics in August 2016. We’ll see, local business-owners have shown skepticism about how much business these events really bring, after the Rio+20 last year was a bit of a toothless bark in terms of the local economy.

But,… environment proclamations are not football-soccer (c)(yes, that is my catch-phrase) for better-or-worse, and certainly the the two million catholic youths anticipated in Rio next month is a new scale. I guess Carnival and New Year’s Eve can draw similar amounts of revelers, so that helps give a sense of how big it will be.

For now though we are thinking about the Seleção – Brazilian national football-soccer team. Lord knows what will happen around here if they don’t manage to take the Confeds Cup in this test run tournament. Let’s go Brazil, go big!