At the end of 2009 there were 174 million subscribers according to Brazilian regulator Anatel. That's 90 per cent of the population and it's still rising fast, with 23 million new subscriptions last year.
For more mobile marketing forecasts for Brazil see this Blog.
Your guide to Brazil is Federico Pisani Massamormile, global chairman and interim CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association and chief executive office of Brazilian mobile aggregator Hanzo.

Q1: How big or advanced is the mobile Web in Brazil and what is the potential?
There are 12 million Brazilians regularly accessing the web using their mobile phones. This is still quite a small proportion of mobile users – about 8 percent, but it is growing fast. Growth of mobile Internet usage and, with it, mobile advertising will be stimulated by more feature-rich devices and more flat-rate data tariffs from mobile carriers.
The potential for mobile Internet here is huge: there are already three times more mobile phones than PCs. Brazil is predicted to follow India as the next hot mobile market. It won’t be long before consumers will start to have their first experience of the Web over a mobile phone, rather than a PC.

Q2: What’s driving growth? What's holding it up?
The arrival of the iPhone, the roll-out of 3G and new data plans being launched by carriers are all helping to drive growth. Barriers include the cost of surfing and the fact that there aren’t enough mobile-ready sites.

Q3: Which industries/sectors have shown the most interest? Is interest from local or international companies?
Both multinational and local companies are showing interest, with companies in the automotive industry and food and beverage among are the most active. Media companies are way ahead in terms of providing mobile content and interactive campaigns.

Q4: Which brands are the most innovative and which spend the most on mobile marketing? Who isn't interested that ought to be?
Fiat is making significant investments. Coca Cola and Anheuser-Busch InBev are also investing in mobile, as do many banks and financial services businesses.
At this stage, I believe everybody is interested, as this is a key touch-point between brands and consumers.

Q5: What are they doing: mobile web site; banner ads; text campaigns?
Text-to-win is the most popular format, but mobile Websites and mobile advertising are both popular as well.

Q6: Do mobile campaigns tend to be part of a larger cross-media campaign?
Usually mobile is an integrated part of a bigger campaign with other media and equivalent Website, but there are also standalone promotional efforts.

Q7: What are the best mobile sites?
Fiat ran a successful mobile campaign for the Punto. Fiatpunto.mobi was fully integrated with the brand equity and marketing support campaign. It was a very successful product launch.

Q8: What type of site is most popular with a) consumers? b) business customers?
For consumers, most mobile Internet activity is on on-deck (on the mobile operator’s portal) – there’s still very little off-deck.
For business customers, banks are the most popular destinations, such as Bradesco and Itau Mobile.

Q9: Who are the most innovative / powerful players on the agency side?
Creative/mobile agencies: F.biz and Pontomobi Interactive and Mobext all had one or more award-winning campaigns at the 2009 MMA Global Awards. Others agencies include AgenciaClick, which is part of Isobar. (There are links to the award-winning campaigns here).
Mobile ad networks: Hands.
(See the profile of Hands in the Guide to mobile ad networks).
Aggregators/integrators: Hanzo, Okto, Yavox and PureBros.

Q10: What makes mobile marketing different in your country compared to abroad?
A large percentage of mobile is prepaid phone (higher than 80 percent). This makes Brazil a very interesting market as advertising could prove a crucial way subsidize telecom costs. This could be an important factor driving higher and fast adoption.

Q11: What is the most exciting thing about mobile?
The fact that this is such a personal device means there’s great potential for carriers to enrich the customer experience with information services and really ‘tailored’ messages that are both more relevant and valuable to advertisers. This makes mobile a very powerful medium.

Hanzo’s mobile-marketing platform helps brands – TV companies, radio stations, newspapers and magazines – to design and execute branded campaigns (alerts, mobile sites, coupons, text-to-win) across all Brazilian carriers.

Mobile Marketing Forum: LATAM takes place in São Paulo, March 2010

Comment below or email editor (at) mobiThinking.com.