This week, the LATAM Roundup brings two news pieces about commerce: Optimise’s goals to grow in the region, especially in mobile, and data from a recent survey about the profile of online shoppers. In addition to that, Brazilian Melt DSP announces two partnerships to address cross-media challenges, connecting the online world to the offline world.

Online Media Group rebranding to Optimise: LATAM represents a great opportunity

Speaking to ExchangeWire Brazil, Stephen Rumbelow, Strategy Director of Optimise, commented about the new brand and the opportunities in LATAM.

According to the company, the change is directly related to the mobile online ecommerce expansion worldwide. Still, there is a lot of room to grow in Latin America, compared to other regions. “Across our global networks we’re seeing smartphones driving the majority of mobile traffic, with 42% of global network traffic coming from smartphones during 2014, which compares to 8% for Brazil. We feel that there is plenty of opportunity for growth from mobile in the Brazil and LATAM markets”, Rumbelow said.

“We also feel that mobile innovation will accelerate in emerging markets, as many consumers continue to skip the adoption of a PC and go straight to mobile”, said Rumbelow, citing Forrester’s data that predicts that smartphone penetration will pass the 50% adoption mark during 2015.

The opportunities are related to the growth in buying power, especially of Brazil’s emerging middle class, known as ‘Class C’. “Class C represents a prime opportunity, especially given it’s the fastest-growing socioeconomic class, with more than 100 million people. Latest research also indicates that Class C will command a significant amount of purchase power – delivering more online sales than classes A & B combined. We believe this consumer group will continue to grow in size, and value, as smartphone penetration increases and m-commerce continues to grow, especially within retail."

Optimise’s goal is to become “one of the top three performance marketing networks in Brazil” within the next 12 months.

E-commerce profile in Brazil

A recent survey from TVxtender, based on data from 94 million people in Brazil, mapped the profile of e-commerce shoppers in the country. Finding that 59% of the total number of people who usually buy online are men. The great majority of the online shoppers in Brazil are between 33 and 42 years old, although youngsters (below 25 years old) have a ‘high influence’ in the decision making in their households.

Also, the upper middle class — known in the country as ‘Class B’ — is responsible for 39% of transactions. The middle class, as known as 'Class C', is responsible for 28%.

Geographically, it is clear that there is greater connectivity in the Southeast region, which results in almost half of all the online purchases in Brazil (47%), followed by the South and the Northeast of Brazil, both with 15% each.

The survey also created profiles for webshoppers, of which two were highlighted. The first one, mouse potatoes, are the ones that understand the online environment and use the web to read news, access social media and most important to research prices and products before buying online. Opposed to that, there are the fast forwards, the users who read online content, but do not spend so much time online. They both represent 22% and 15% of the online consumers, respectively.

Regarding platforms, even though the country is known by the mobile trend, only 10% of the online purchases are made via smartphones or tablets.

Melt DSP boosts partnerships

The Brazilian Melt DSP and Ibope announced a partnership for monitoring programmatic campaigns. They will offer Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings, that gives their customers the possibility to compare online and offline data in real time, generating reports with reach, frequency, impressions and demographic data.

In addition to that, Melt announced another partnership with Hagah, a hyper local search portal from RBS Group, a media company from the South of Brazil.  Since 2006, Hagah has been the search tool used when consumers want to find local business.

With the partnership, Melt will have access to a specific cluster that connects online with the offline world: consumers that are looking for services in a given place.

According to the companies, Hagah has six million monthly unique users — and are expecting to raise this number to 10 million by the end of the year.