Paulo showed up in a super large bus to take us over to
ESPN Brazil at 9a. The bus even had
WiFi, #Win!. Upon arriving, we learned
that our main contact hadn’t arrived yet, but we were shown to a conference
room to drop our bags and given a short tour of the studios. This location has two main studios, one of
which is under construction and the other was in the midst of filming a live
show, which we got to watch from the wings!
During our tour, we crossed paths with Roberto, who is the Manager of
Digital Media. He walked us through the
“mobile first” motto at ESPN, where everything is first developed for mobile
and then for the computer. His
department monitors the web statistics of what people are looking at (a
live-feed) and then feed that information, including anything surprising, to
the news desk, so that the editorial department can have the option to change
the topics being talked about on the sports desk at that time.
After our hallway chat with Roberto, we were brought back
to the conference room where we had dropped our stuff and were joined by
Fernando. He walked us through the three
channels of ESPN in Brazil and then introduced us to Carlos Maloof, who is the
Programming and Acquisitions Director.
Finally, we were joined by Fernando Casseloni, who is the head of
Engineering, Operations, and IT. It was
very interesting to hear how all three of their roles melded together and also
how they were in the midst (that day) of finalizing their 2016 budget, which
was why the first Fernando wasn’t able to join us for long (he had phone
conferences to attend to). The thing
that I found most interesting at ESPN Brazil was how the office was using
Business Intelligence to not only drive their content to the viewer, but also
in their driving of advertisements to the viewer. Also, it was comforting to know that they
experience some of the same challenges that we do in the states with
demographics (i.e. elderly) and mobile.
We left ESPN and headed back to the hotel to pack up our
things and head over to the GRU Airport.
Our delayed flight departed GRU for Rio de Janeiro (GIG) about an hour
late (745p) and we arrived in Rio around 9pm.
Our tour provider, Be a Local, met us at the airport and loaded up our
luggage and drove us to our hotel in Copacabana. We had another issue with English/Portuguese,
but between Jo and Heidi (and the GPS on Jo’s phone) the van driver was finally
able to find our hotel on Copacabana beach, the Hotel Astoria Palace. It was late, so while most of the group went
out to explore the late-night life, I stayed in the room and ordered room
service and worked on my blog and then fell asleep.
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