As part of the upcoming ESOMAR conference in Mexico, we placed an ad on April’s issue of research world which will be given out in the conference. This is a little preview of the ad:

Hope you like it!

Latin Business Chronicle reports on a study from ZenithOptimedia that argues that online ad spending in the region is growing at a faster pace than the world average. The reasons cited for this are the following:
• Growing Internet Penetration
• Increased Internet Usage per person
“Brazil’s online ad market grew by 66.6 percent last year to $278 [...]

We came across an interesting press release from Hi Media Group this morning:
• Latin Americans spend  375 minutes per user per month on social networking sites (as opposed to 249 minutes in USA)
• Visitors to social networks grew by 16% from November 2006-June 2007.
• With 75% of all unique visitors going to social networks, Brazilians [...]

We are very excited to announce the opening of our Brazilian office. We also congratulate Joana Lacerda on her new appointment, she is now Regional Director for Latin America and is relocating from our London office to our headquarters in Buenos Aires.
Please read the press release here:
Livra Panels Opens Office in Brazil as Online Research [...]

According to the Mercury Times, Google’s Eric Schmidt has indicated that he plans to invest significantly (via acquisitions and growing their own offices) in Latin America.
The article mentions that Google expects Latin American sales to more than double this year. That’s awesome (he didn’t mention anything about this though…).
We are very optimistic about the region [...]

eMarketer just released new global Internet penetration numbers. Although still behind the other regions, Latin America keeps growing steadily. These are the latest numbers:

According to eMarketer: “Countries such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and Mexico are relatively immature Internet markets and will be the primary drivers for worldwide Internet user growth over the next five [...]

Since yesterday Facebook is available in Spanish. It’s interesting for us how from all the languages they could choose to launch first, Spanish was the chosen one. This shows how increasingly important the Spanish speaking world is becoming for the Internet giants (MySpace launched their Spanish version a few months ago).
We released some results in [...]

Just to give you a little picture of how certain things are in South America, a Brazilian federal judge has “banned” two very popular video games (Counter-strike and EverQuest) because he is apparently sure that they provoke violence. Apparently moments after the ban came into place thousands of teenagers descended from the favelas and gave [...]

Brazil seems to be doing everything right at the moment, they just announced a government plan to expand broadband Internet access to nearly everyone who has a telephone line. The project, which would cost $ 1.7 billion, mostly consists in laying new fiber optic telephone lines.
The press release says that although Brazil has more than [...]

A survey conducted by the Spanish university of Navarra and internet educational organisation EducaRed showed some interesting though questionable results about children and their relationship with the Internet in Latin America. 21,774 pupils aged 6-18 years were surveyed in Argentina, Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Venezuela. They filled in online forms adapted to [...]