XYZ | Unknowns and Intangibles

I read it in DCI | Comércio, Indústria & Serviços as I was hunting through the press clippings for a a good example of a Material Event, in the technical sense, to design a wiki form for.

Says here that the future of Brazilian mass entertainment holds more Nuremburg rallies that in does Woodstocks, in the estimation of one of Brazil’s leading Mad Men.

Led by publicist Nizan Guanaes, ABC Group has put together an all-star cast to launch XYZ Live, a company that will specialize in mounting events on a national scale, in the belief that this will be Brazil’s Decade of Entertainment.

In 2011, XYZ is expected t o bring in R$ 169 million, and a total of R$ 599 million by 2014. “The expectation is that  XYZ will represent 40% of the group’s business by 2014”, said Guga Valente, group chief executive.

ABC will invest R$ 110 million in acquisitions during the period. “We will need to grow organically and through acquisitions, and so we are studying new business opportunities”, he said.

For now the new division has hired on 40 new staff. “Entertainment is a great medium for communication.”

Yes, House M.D. badly dubbed into Portuguese is a splendid vehicle for moving the iPad off the shelves — if you can get around the trouble people have relating to it because it is produced in a language that has only extraordinarily badly been taught to the target-audience.

I wonder how those forecasts stack up against the total current market, nationwide, for live mass events.

Given the policy priorities of the current federal administration, in any case, I would call announcing a wave of market-concentrating M&A deals an act of true chutzpah.

ABC is one of the Brazilian agencies phoning fortake out in foreign markets, rather than being snapped up by visiting heavyweights such as WPP, Publicis, Havas, Omnicom, and, now, Microsoft Advertising in the digital hexagon.

Nizan was rumored to have been offered $1 billion by WPP for his shares in ABC in October of last year, but denied those rumors after letting them percolate for a couple of days.

In the meantime, he sidelined himself rather than running the presidential campaign of São Paulo governor José Serra, as he had in 2002.

Someday, the cartelization of the mass media and the oligopsony enjoyed by a handful of global advertisers is going to come to a head, and someone is likely to get hurt in the process.

The previous administration did, however, have a certain predilection for creating home-grown multinationals — like Friboi, the new owner of Swift & Co. and like BrOI, the merger of Brasil Telecom and Oi — although the success of the latter as a multinational is still to be determined.

I would like to say quite a bit more about why these news are interesting on so many levels, but duty calls.

I will close this period recalling that several of the major political scandals of the mid-decade involved laundering kickbck money through public events — the spectactular Rock in Rio always packs them in — co-sponsored by public authorities.