This week, we bring the following LATAM Roundup stories: numbers of the display inventory in Brazil compiled by Publya; CENP, Brazilian regulator of media trading, recommends companies to invest in ad tech — as long as they follow the rules, obviously; and Cazamba announces a platform that will enable the digital agency to trade programmatically.

The programmatic scenario in Brazil

The previous version of this LATAM RoundUp had a chart with numbers of programmatic in Brazil. This post was edited on 30/09/2015, at 4.40pm (London time), and the chart was removed due to unauthorised data usage by Publya.   

Brazil’s regulators take a closer look at programmatic

CENP, the Brazilian institution that regulates advertising trading in all sorts of media in Brazil (including digital), is looking carefully at programmatic, publicly stating “it is time to invest” in it. Specially, with the forecast that automated media buying should soon be more than half of the digital media market in the country — in the US, for example, it already represents 66%, according to IAB US.

In their latests monthly magazine, a piece talks about the local players who are building their programmatic stack in compliance with local rules, speaking about the risk of bots and fraud in the ecosystem.

Brazil is known for its particularities in media trading. For example, a local rule establishes that agencies have a discount when they buy media space from any sort of publisher, giving them a strong advantage with competitive prices, compared to when sold directly between publishers and advertisers. In addition to that, media bureaus are not allowed in the country — in the past, the ones which tried to establish themselves suffered boycotts. It is still a controversial topic in the industry.

The full text is available online (starting on page 20, in Portuguese).

Another platform in the Brazilian ecossystem

Cazamba, a rich media digital agency, is working in a proprietary platform that will enable automated trading of campaigns. The agency is going through a major restructuring to redefine goals for the near future, and one of them is to allow programmatic media trading.

According to Flavio Pereira, CEO, Cazamba, this is one of the demands detected in their close relationship with agencies. The tech is being developed by Victor Canô, founder and CTO, who has been responsible for all the deployments and features of their technology so far.

“We will be able to make fast decisions that will enable us to change our strategy direction faster in the future, according to the main trends of the market. If there is a demand for private marketplaces, for example, we will be able to offer that”, Canô says. Yet, he projects that the main focus of the company will be rich media and interactive formats. “We will not be a programmatic-only company, this is not our goal. The thing is that we detected a demand from agencies and media automation is where most of the investments are going now, pressured by an economic situation in Brazil that requires more effective investments and ROI”, Canô affirms.

In 2015, Cazamba expects their revenue to grow by 200%. The platform is expected to be launched in the first semester of 2016, and will be also be the base of LATAM expansion of their operations. Initially, Argentina and Chile will be the targets — according to eMarketer’s forecast, the Argentinian market will be the fastest growing digital media marketplace by 2019.