Mirantte News was a products-and-services guide that went beyond a regional search mechanism. Selected companies signed annual plans combining homepage prominence, indexing in one of roughly twenty portal categories and a dedicated hot-site with professional photography, logo, contact information, an article produced by journalist Tatiana Cavalcanti, and geolocation and route-planning features developed through a partnership with MapLink/UOL.
Marcelo Nicchio ran the project in partnership with Luiz Kechichian, owner of Grupo Mirantte. The operation was lean: besides Nicchio, the team came to include a webmaster, a commercial contact and an administrative assistant.
As contracts accumulated, however, a central problem emerged: traffic. The portal's organic volume was not enough to feed all categories evenly and deliver the exposure advertisers expected.
In that context, a MapLink contact arranged a Skype conversation between Nicchio and Tiago Luz, one of the early Search Marketing professionals in Brazil, then based in Curitiba. The solution discussed was straightforward: buy traffic for the categories with the greatest concentration of advertisers and incorporate that cost into the portal's own commercial model.
The first acquisition campaigns worked and remained active for several months. Even so, Mirantte News became progressively difficult to sustain economically. The operation was reduced and moved to a home-office model, leaving Nicchio and webmaster Renato Carriel. Later, the guide shifted its positioning and expanded its scope to the city of São Paulo under the name Procure SP, but eventually ceased operations.
The project ended, but the problem it had presented opened a new professional direction. Search remained.
