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ARTICLE

MediaMath Brazil: To Educate the Market is Key to Growth Consolidation

June 21, 2016 — by MediaMath    

This article by Karen Ferraz originally appears on ExchangeWire and has been translated from Portuguese to English below:

The company specializing in programmatic media, recently celebrated its two years of operation in Brazil with a staff three times its original size, positive results for the first quarter and annual growth in the triple digits. Fernando Juarez, MD of MediaMath for Latin America, and the new country manager Brazil Mario Rubino, told the ExchangeWire Brazil that the expectation is to maintain the pace of business by the end of the year to consolidate this growth and develop the market with educational initiatives on the use of programmatic technologies.

Latin America is currently the fastest growing region for MediaMath, Juarez sees this as a clear message that the adoption of programmatic media technologies is growing by the agencies and marketers in the region. The company now has operations in 13 countries in the region, such as Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Guatemala.

“These last two years represented a spectacular growth for the company in Brazil. We are excited about the continued growth and the company’s future growth in the country and we want to further boost this advance in the program market, ” says Juarez. According to him, Brazil should become very soon the largest market for the company in the region, overtaking Mexico, which is still the largest due to the rapid development of trading desks.

Ad tech saw some of its competitors leaving the Brazilian market during this period, driving MediaMath’s ambition to win more participation in the region and advance on the dominance of big players such as Google and Facebook. To Fernando Juarez, Brazil is definitely experiencing the beginning of a growth stage in programmatic, which creates many opportunities triggered by increased investment from advertisers seeking more efficiency. But this also bring more challenges, especially in overcoming knowledge gaps on new technologies in digital and programmatic marketing.

Programmatic media has allowed advertisers from around the world to reach their audiences and get better results, both in costs and in the way that ads are delivered. “Whether in time of economic crisis or not, any marketing professional is seeking the best result from the money being invested; therefore, programmatic is in a time of growth around the world,” insists Fernando Juarez, noting that the country is one of the largest economies in the world.

Going forward, the goal of MediaMath Brazil is to grow faster, consolidate this growth and collaborate with the education market, said Mario Rubino, who took over the local leadership of the company a month ago. “The digital market is understanding and increasingly interested in the use of platforms like ours, digital spend is migrating to programmatic media. The market is becoming more concentrated, as some competitors have left. So the mission is to continue working to serve our customers well and bring our products and knowledge, ” he adds.

Educating to grow

Educating the market has been one of the main pillars of the company’s strategy since it began its Brazilian operations in 2014. In recent months, this approach gained a further boost with the launch of the New Marketing Institute (NMI) in São Paulo. NMI, the company’s educational arm, is present in several cities of the world and was created to help meet the growing demand for marketing professionals in digital and programmatic.

For the country manager, Mario Rubino, this is a natural process of maturation, as experienced by the more mature markets, where advertisers and agencies begin to better understand how the use of the platforms can deliver more results. Thus, the company has developed educational programs with clients, agencies, and trading desks, as well as partnerships with major education groups in Brazil. “It’s part of our mission to educate and train people to work in this new market and it is amazing how soon we can see the interest in these initiatives.”