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LIONS DAILY NEWS
THURSDAY / JUNE 25 / 2015
FOCUS ON BRAZIL
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BRAZILIANS ARE NATURALLY FRIENDLY, SOCIAL AND COMMUNICATIVE. NO WONDER THEIR COUNTRY IS HOME TO ONE OF THE BIGGEST SOCIAL-MEDIA MARKETS IN THE WORLD, WRITES CLAUDIA PENTEADO
CONNECTED BRAZIL FACEBOOK, Instagram, Waze, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Snapchat… Create a social network or service that connects people intelligently, quickly and efficiently, and Brazil will be there, eager, experimenting, participating, generating impressive audience figures. And that’s not just because we are 200 million people and one of our cities, Sao Paulo, is more populated than Tokyo, Seoul and Moscow. Brazil is the third largest worldwide in terms of time spent on the internet. More than 50% of our population is connected in some way. We have 97 million people with accounts on at least two social networks. Last year, we grew by 12% in social-web activity compared to the previous year. So why are we such social creatures? There are numerous explanations that combine and complement one another. Brazilian society is relational. Anthropologist Roberto DaMatta and historian Sergio Buarque de Holanda both concluded that Brazilian society is by nature a cordial one, in contrast to American individualism and the essentially holistic culture of India, for example. In Brazil, being sociable has a high value. We do not have difficulties in exposing ourselves, showing off our bodies and our babies’ photographs, publicly celebrating our families, our social gatherings, our celebrations. We share our successes. We are informal, curious and improvisers by nature. Values such as privacy and modesty are lost in the digital need for self-expression among our millennials, who are driving the global economy forward. We aren’t great lovers of technology: for Brazilians, what matters is to take part. Brazilian Anselmo Ramos, who leads David in Miami, puts it like this: “Long before the internet, Brazilians were social. Long before Facebook’s ‘likes’, we had a similar positive gesture using our thumbs. Long before Facebook enabled us to poke digitally, we poked physically. Long before the share, we yelled over fences. Long before the comment, we stuck our noses where they didn’t belong. Long before the tweet, we shared our life with everyone.
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Long before the retweet, we went out there repeating things we heard.” In Brazil, politicians use social networks indiscreetly and executives are dismissed for their excesses on the web. One of the richest men in the world, the Brazilian Eike Batista, has defended his beliefs in pointless discussions with strangers on Twitter — not to mention he is being sued for giving stock investment tips (benefiting his own companies) on social networks. The web also reduces the great distances in Brazil. Large urban centres are filled with immigrants from various regions, who have been reconnecting with relatives and friends since the days of Orkut, the first real social network that found its biggest market in Brazil. It made sense — we are a population who loves to organise itself into groups, fan clubs, churches, task forces. “Brazilian digital behaviour is a legacy of our behaviour in real life,” says Fabio Seidl, another Brazilian in charge of a US agency — Lapiz/Leo Burnett in Chicago — and a heavy user of social networks. In this country, access to information is via social inclusion. Having a smartphone and being connected to the internet makes people feel included, not segregated. It also means not having to buy a computer (and having to learn to use Microsoft’s Windows, for example); not having to buy a home-internet service. But perhaps one of the biggest drivers of these statistics, and the one that puts us up among the largest users of digital services, is the fact that customer service in Brazil is generally poor. This is particular true of our public-policy services. Things in general do not work so well here. The Portuguese writer Pero de Magalhaes Gandavo, who wrote about a savage and still unexplored Brazil back in 1500, described it as a land without law, without king. We appear to be continuing to act just like that. “Perhaps the internet and its free environment — without hierarchies, anarchic, multifaceted — is pretty much like Brazil, and makes cyberspace a representation of a place where Brazilians feel at ease, comfortable. That, along with the lack of other leisure options for the
same price…” says Mario Barreto, a producer and director at Imagine Productions in Rio de Janeiro. The digital world has opened doors for us to find what is lacking in our stores. Online goods are cheaper to buy than in physical stores and the services provided are better. Digital helps us to get taxis quickly, order food without stress, map our routes easily to work, get away from bureaucracy. It means avoiding inefficient physical banking services and urban violence. You bypass bumpy roads and avoid inefficient telephone services. Digital can be a creative playground to find new ways to avoid bureaucracy and the natural slowness of the real world. Inventive by nature, cariocas (Rio de Janeiro natives) invented a Twitter service that reveals the exact locations of police officers looking for drunken drivers. How cool is that? We are also procrastinators par excellence — which makes us the world recordholders in terms of video consumption online, as noted by my creative friend Bruno Pinaud, who works as a creative copywriter and screenwriter at NBS in Rio and who created the globally popular video app iSofa.tv. In fact, according to comScore, last March Brazilians consumed more than 11 billion videos. And by the way, I almost forgot to add that the internet does not work very well in Brazil. 4G high-speed mobile signals seem like an unattainable utopia. So I guess what ultimately defines us, above all, is our hopeless optimism and determination. • We Are Social was the main source of the data mentioned in this article
Claudia Penteado is a Brazilian journalist who lives in Rio de Janeiro and writes about marketing for Ad Age, PropMark, Jornal do Commercio and Epoca Negocios. Mother of 12-year-old Juliana and a Yorkshire terrier named Flor, she lives in a house so close to the rain forest that monkeys visit all the time
24/06/2015 18:42