In August 22, 2005 at 5:48 PM, CNN en Español during Finance and Economy block made a LIVE interview with Gaston Taratuta in a conversation about Search in Latin America.
I met Gaston back in SES New York in 2004. He is the president and founder of Internet Marketing Services Inc. ("IMS"), a leading media firm with exclusive rights to represent UOL and Folha Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest ISP and newspaper respectively. Gaston is an industry veteran and a leading authority in online marketing in Latin America. Some of IMS’ clients include Dell, Microsoft, Sony, and Visa – just to name a few. He is a very dedicated and talented person, but most of all, he is experiencing how Search is growing in Latin America.
In his interview, CNN en Español anchor Alberto Padilla asks Gaston to talk about the differences between Google and Yahoo! as well as their product and service offerings. Gaston talks about the importance of Search in the U.S. in comparison with other online advertising alternatives. Gaston gives numbers about the growth in Latin America for online advertising which was about 25% higher in 2004 and most likely will see an additional 20 and 30% growth for 2005. However, he mentions it's still only 1.5% of all advertising spend, so there is even more potential opportunities for companies to take advantage of this type of advertising by adding search marketing and other online exposure into their total mix.
When he moved on to talk about Search, he was more specific about Brazil, since it's his core focus. He said that there are about 600 million queries per month, which is a great opportunity for the small and medium businesses so that not only the big mayor brands can have access to this type of online advertising. He mentions that there are 7,500 companies already spending money on Search in Brazil, 2,000 companies in Mexico and 1,000 companies in Argentina.
Yesterday, I had a very good phone conversation with Gaston to talk more on this subject. We both agree on the investment opportunity for global companies to be doing search in Latin America. As well as the importance of the mayor search engines (Yahoo!, Google and MSN) to having local presence to educate businesses on search and the impressive returns on investment along with the effectiveness of tracking all information down to the smallest detail.
What a few of my closest collegues and I see, is a great opportunity for search engine marketing firms and professionals that know search engine optimization to take on this NEW roller coaster ride and make tons of money helping these businesses grow. This is the primary reason why SES Latino 2006 is taking place and everyone interested in the topic of making money on search marketing to new markets should definetly attend.
