Our strategy in Rio has taken the Cities of Love global initiative on a different path, more social and more impactful.

With Rio, I Love You, we built an online cultural platform showcasing the city with the support of its artists, creators, communities, celebrities, and this initiative successfully allowed us to finance the film Rio, I Love You that was completed in Fall 2014.

When we launched  the  Rio platform, we received a warm welcome from the mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes. Thanks to numerous actions and events, the Rio, I Love You platform made people proud of their city and had an impact on their lives: through visuals arts and social media, the platform tells the story of the city’s inhabitants with a positive community-driven perspective. Hope and love are the true engines of these social enterprises encouraging active citizenship.

Over a one year-period, the Rio, I Love You Movement  went  from 17,000 followers to 1.1 million, sometimes growing at a pace of 100,000 people per month. This city-wide platform, an online community gathers today 1.5 million followers, 74% of them aged between 13 and 24 years old, key targets for sponsors and brands. This explains the ability for the City, I Love You platform to raise money thus covering its operating cost, and later to finance 74% of the budget of feature-length film Rio, I Love You. And the platform was only developed with Portuguese content (and no English), which even limited its global impact and financing perspectives.

The platform raised US$ 10 million thus allowing the launching of a Mentoring Program involving 10 aspiring local directors. This example illustrates our capacity to launch platforms, and to create, produce and interact with the city life in association with value-driven sponsors and brands financing these endeavors. The assignment of this platform is also to build an international audience for the city of Rio de Janeiro, to connect and empower people while boosting tourism-driven strategy in the perspective of the 2104 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

This initiative was a success for our team, and later leaded to the development of a new Cities of Love model with the key aspiration to make it a non-profit social entreprise.