In this week’s LATAM Roundup: Brazilian Congressmen to discuss what are the limits to blocking digital services after a court has taken down WhatsApp for the second time in the country; New head of programmatic sales at Yahoo; Adjust announces an office in Brazil as part of their international expansion; Predicta is now a Google-certified partner for programmatic, focusing in SMB; and the Twitter user base in Latin America, that keeps growing steadily.

After second blocking of WhatsApp, Brazilian congressmen want to discuss limits for lawsuits

This week was marked for the second time a digital service was shut down by a Brazilian Court. WhatsApp was down in Brazil for more than 24 hours starting on Monday, 2 May, around 2pm, local time. The decision was taken after Facebook allegedly refused to c0-operate with local Justice, ignoring the requests of user data in a crime investigation.

Therefore, Brazilian congressmen have put in their agenda this week a discussion about limits to intervene in digital communication services, in order to prevent new similar actions to happen. They want to create a law that regulates what is necessary to block websites and apps, limiting such a move to only if a digital service is created to disseminate illegal content. This way, pirate websites and similar services would be the kind of businesses that would be blocked.

“I believe that we should not block [services like WhatsApp], if WhatsApp is used within legal parameters. What can we do to acquire specific information that they have, but have refused to share with the Justice? I’d say heavy fines, and if that is the case, arrest the responsible people. But blocking harms a third party, which are the users, and this is not right, in my opinion”, said Frederico Meinberg, prosecutor, to Matheus Leitão’s blog in G1.

Former Cadreon GM takes over programmatic at Yahoo Brazil

Walter Motta Junior is the new head of programmatic sales at Yahoo Brazil. His role at Yahoo will be to drive results in selling automated solutions through all formats, especially video, display, and native.

The executive believes that the biggest challenge will be to “educate the market about the possibilities of programmatic, once [Yahoo] has a broad offer with a DSP, ad exchange, inventory”.

Motta has been working in the digital industry for the past eight years and is a known name in the Brazilian market. He has worked as co-director, Cadreon Brasil, and also led programmatic at Reprise, part of IPG group. According to Cadreon, Darwin Ribeiro takes over the position of co-director after Motta — he is former head of Sociomantic in Brazil, founder of Ocapi, an ad tech startup acquired by Reamp in January, and has also worked for digital ad agencies.

Adjust announces Latin American operations

Adjust announced the start of their Brazilian operations, following their global expansion and reaching Latin America for the first time. Other markets will be Asia, focusing on Singapore.

The offices will be in São Paulo, Brazil, and Ricardo Feldman will lead the operations. According to the company, they already have some clients, which set the base for the expansion. Some of their biggest accounts are Microsoft, Rovio, and Loovo.

Adjust has opened four new offices around the world in the past two months, reaching 11 markets with a physical presence. The team now reaches 100 people.

Predicta closes deal with Google LATAM

The Brazilian ad tech company Predicta announced a deal with Google in Latin America that places the company as a certified partner to offer managing and optimisation services of Adsense and Ad Exchange campaigns. The goal is to help small- and medium-sized businesses to operate data-driven campaigns, maximising inventories and budgets.

“Our access to [Google’s] team, and the direct relationship with them, allows us to guide clients to the best format for their campaigns, aligned to their business”, said Henrique Paulino, sales manager, Predicta. The company emphasises that this is an opportunity to take programmatic campaigns to SMBs.

Twitter user base in Latin America: stable growth

One of the most stable markets for Twitter is Brazil. According to the microblog’s database, analysed by the Mexican data company Mundoejecutivo, the users in the country keeps growing steadily and has reached 40.7 million users in Q4 2015. Mexico is the second biggest market in Latin America, with 35.3 million users, followed by Argentina, with 11.8 million.

eMarketer’s estimates are lower: 24.6 million users in Brazil at the same period, 21.3 million for Mexico, and 7.1 million in Argentina. Yet, Latin America represents a steadily growth for Twitter. Argentina is the country with a highest increase in user base, according to eMarketer: 20.9% last year and an expected 12.8% in 2016.