This week's LATAM Roundup introduces Gervasio Marques Peña, IAB Argentina's new president, who aims to consolidate the internet as a mass media environment locally and promote best practices in the Argentinian ad market; DMP Navegg and video company DynAdmic announce segmentation partnership in Brazil; and 16 digital companies and startups form ABRIA, the Brazilian Association of Artificial Intelligence, led by Baidu's country manager, to promote the adoption of technologies in the country.

Introducing IAB Argentina's new president

Gervasio Marques Peña (pictured left), commercial manager, La Nación publisher, is now the new president for IAB Argentina. He will be supported by Gustavo Buchbinder, CEO, W-Hub and co-founder, Webar Interactive, who now takes the vice presidency position in the bureau after the results of latest elections.

The main priority for IAB Argentina, according to the new leadership, is to consolidate the internet as a mass media in the country, as well as support and help to increase investments in the digital market. The entity also mentioned improving local knowledge on digital advertising, as well as disseminating industry’s best practices and standards.

DynAdmic & Navegg announce deal in Brazil

DynAdmic announced a partnership with Navegg in the Brazilian market to offer video segmentation campaigns using the DMP’s data, in order to expand their services which collect and manage audience data. The data includes user behaviour information in order to define targets for each campaign.

“DynAdmic and Navegg are together offering clusters in more than 1,400 market segments, analysing gender, age, school degree, social data, interests, product, work information, brands preferences, among other segmentation categories”, said Lara Krumholz, general manager, DynAdmic Latin America.

Marcio Figueira, chief commercial officer, DynAdmic Brazil, said the company is focused on providing more insights about local consumer behaviour. He emphasises the importance of using data in order to improve the local ad market quality, including brand safety, through independent auditing on top of data services used by advertisers.

ABRIA: A Brazilian initiative towards artificial intelligence

In the same week in which Google unveiled services connecting virtual reality, cognitive computing, and promised more ambitious results with machine learning during the I/O conference, in San Francisco, a group of 16 Brazilian companies and startups announced their alliance towards a related field: artificial intelligence. They form ABRIA, which stands for Brazilian Association of Artificial Intelligence.

Yan Di, country manager, Baidu Brazil, is ABRIA’s lead — the third position of the executive in Brazil, since Di is also leading ABO2O (Brazilian Association of Online to Offline).

According to ABRIA’s first statement, they estimate 40 new companies working with AI solutions Brazil. Their main goal is to articulate a joint work to exchange information among local players, encouraging AI adoption in the country.

Di mentions that simple AI implementations can bring productivity to increase by 40%, and even higher, by 60%, in certain sectors such as retail. Rodrigo Scotti, CEO, Nama, also part of ABRIA, reinforces the importance of companies in this niche to work together locally.

For now, the companies forming ABRIA are Baidu, Nuveo, MeCasei, Dataholics, Nexus Edge, Directtalk, Hekima, Neurologic, Horizonfour, Mvisia, Allgoo, Docbot, Intexfy, Nama, Fhinck, and Geofusion.