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| Effect Sports executive director and founder Pedro Rego Monteiro and his mother, Dr. Rosa Celia Pimentel Barbosa, after he carried the Olympic Torch in Rio. |
For a case study in how the Olympics can transform a business, take a look at Pedro Rego Monteiro’s Effect Sports, a sports marketing agency based in Rio de Janeiro.
Founded in '08 by Monteiro, a former Olympic swimmer, Effect Sports was a small fish until the IOC awarded the Games to Rio in '09. A few months later, the U.S. Olympic Committee reached out for help setting up Team USA operations in Brazil, including tasks like finding hospitality and official housing sites, training locations and a range of security and safety testing for Team USA over the course of six years.
That USOC work led directly to deals with Nike, the NFL and the Danish and Canadian Olympic committees for marketing help in Brazil. Add those to its first client from launch, Gatorade, and another other contract with the NBA, and today the firm has 53 employees.
“It’s been a huge series of synchronicity, and it’s worked out really well,” Monteiro said Saturday, two days after carrying the Olympic torch in its final path into the city.
Monteiro didn’t start from zero exactly. As a teenager, he moved with his family from Brazil to Boston in '91 when his mother, Dr. Rosa Celia Pimentel Barbosa, took a position at Boston Children’s Hospital. He stayed in the U.S. to attend Kenyon College in Ohio and later trained under USC swimming coach Mark Schubert and famed German coach Michael Lohberg before returning to swim for Brazil.
His mother is so highly regarded in Brazil for her work as a pediatric cardiologist for poor children that she was chosen to carry the Olympic flag with five others during Friday’s opening ceremony.
Effect Sports’ business with the USOC includes a little bit of everything, but the location scouting started first and carried the biggest stakes. Particularly in this crowded, traffic-clogged city, location counts double and competition was fierce. The USOC tried to get an early jump on the rest of the world by reaching out just a few months after being dealt a crushing blow when Chicago lost out to Rio.
That early work paid off when Effect was able to help the USOC secure a training site at the Clube de Regatas do Flamengo, an expansive upscale club on the banks of Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon. It’s one of the few places in the city that’s somewhat centrally located to the widely dispersed Olympic activity clusters.
“We’re surprised at how early the U.S. got here,” Monteiro said. “They got started way early, and that’s why they were able to get Flamengo, a place most Olympic committees would want.”
Ultimately, the USOC found the space for its USA House through an independent channel, but Monteiro is helping there as the named Brazilian director of the house business in order to fulfill a Brazilian corporate law. Also, Effect helped secure two more training spots at the Brazilian Naval School and Lonier, convenient to their respective sports venues.
Effect and the USOC hit a hiccup a few years back when they had a signed contract on a facility at a military base in Urca, an upscale neighborhood at the base of Sugarloaf Mountain. It turned out the Brazilian Olympic Committee had already declared its intentions on the space, and they had to look elsewhere.
Today, Monteiro’s business runs the NFL’s digital marketing in Brazil. (American football is bigger than you think, he claims.) That contract grew out of his connections with the USOC’s Lisa Baird and Peter Zeytoonjian, both former NFL marketers, Monteiro said. He’s also parlayed Team USA into some smaller contracts with the Olympic teams of Canada and Denmark, and in '12 started running grassroots local marketing for the NBA in Brazil.
“The natural connection I have to the U.S. has really catalyzed in the last two years,” he said. “It’s a very cool, organic thing.”
