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| Outside Omega House on Ipanema Beach |
Worldwide Olympic sponsors each pay $100 million or more for the exclusive right to target consumers with the Games, and their intended audience runs the gamut from kids at McDonald’s to the world’s wealthiest people.
On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to tour the Omega House on Ipanema Beach, possibly the highest of the highest-end marketing tools in Rio. Omega rented out the Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim, a remarkable three-story whitewalled building with a terrace and picture window of the Atlantic Ocean.
Vistors enter to a 9-meter waterfall with statues of an Olympic diver in different poses as he descends into an Omega logo. The interior courtyard is open to the sky, with bright white couches and wooden swings hanging from two-story ropes.
The second floor is where Omega really brings out the goods. An unidentified, wealthy Brazilian physician and watch collector donated part of his collection, which includes 1,000 Omega timepieces alone. They were displayed in four themed rooms, including a dark outer-space room promoting Omega’s role as the wristwatch of the early hero astronauts, a “Ladies’ Room” showing off a historical sampling of women’s lines (the smell of fresh flowers was almost overwhelming) and a SeaMaster room decorated in an under-the-sea motif displaying the Omega SeaMaster brand. In between the watches, patrons had a 150-degree view of the ocean through a picture window. The upstairs bar was surrounded by another collection of classic Omega timepieces.
In between the display rooms, Omega documented the other extreme of its activations in Rio: a series of 12 “social action” projects with charity Viva Rio to improve community spaces and education centers in the city’s favelas.
Omega declined to disclose the cost of the house build-out.
For a Q&A with Omega CEO Raynald Aeschlimann, click here.
