Keywords

1 Introduction

The ecosystem of brands, in algorithmic mediation, brings a new ontological status to the signic mediation of advertising. It is understood that signs give the communication mediations and that these mediations are founders of the sociocultural realities. Mediations, in this work, can be understood from a philosophical perspective, as a sort of materialist phenomenology [4, 16].

The materiality of digital signs, via algorithms, invites us to a new dimension of the writing of things in the digital humanities, which goes beyond the mediation of technicality, and spreads in the logic of production, industrial formats, institutions and cultural matrices, generating new sociabilities and new cognitions that are manifested in the mediations of the consumption of the brands with their appropriations and new rituals for consumers.

The communicative condition of the mediations of things in consumption was our object of the previous discussion in Perez and Trindade [18], which supported the propositions of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, sought to understand the aesthetic, ethical and logical dimensions of consumption signs, including in this kind of research, advertisings and every ecosystem of brands with their expressiveness.

At the same time, it also sought to observe the interfaces of these dimensions of consumption in the sociocultural realities in which such phenomena occur. In this theoretical complementation between cultural mediations and signic mediation, consumption is seen as a communicational mediation that would articulate regulatory or intermediary instances of sociocultural dynamics, based on the Martín-Barbero model/map of mediations [16].

Such a model is discussed in its intermedialities implied to the interactional dynamics of goods, services, and brands with consumers for the constitution of signic sense links in cultural life, as outlined in the previous paragraph. It is perceived in this theoretical intersection that communication would function as pragmatics of social discursivization.

This theoretical effort enunciated in the previous lines now seeks its adaptation to the phenomena of digital advertising, manifested in the algorithms mediation. It is noteworthy that, in the opportunity of this text, although also consider the contribution of Charles Sanders Peirce, the reflection will be held on the same principle of this combination Semiotics and mediations, but now this theoretical crossroads is more oriented by the perspective of the French semiotic approach as proposed by Algirdas Julien Greimas.

Nevertheless, regardless of the semiotic approach used, this work continues to perceive signic mediation as a communicational condition in a philosophical-theoretical perspective phenomenological-materialist, as discussed by Couldry and Hepp [4], since the semiopragmatic in the Peirce or Greimas aspect is seen here in the material and symbolic condition that the signs of the algorithms assume in the processes of communication and consumption, in the media studies, whether these are defended in the concepts of communication mediations of the cultures or by the concept of mediatization.

It should be clarified that Martín-Barbero’s theory of mediations [16] is not the same thing as the theories of mediatization. However, we work with the possibility of approximation that authors like Couldry and Hepp [5] present as currents of the studies of mediatization and in which they approach with Martín-Barbero on the concept of communicational mediations in cultures. With both concepts (mediations and mediatization) we seek to understand the processes that correspond to the media’s modes of presence and performance in the transformations of cultures. This is the aspect worth emphasizing here since our interpretation of the questions of definitions about mediations and consumption mediation has already been discussed in other papers [21].

We are interested, specifically, at this moment of reflection, in the questions of the communication mediations in the consumptions, starting from the algorithms as mediating instances of daily life. The algorithms assume a relevance for the definition of new cultural patterns of interaction, being this a prominent aspect of the media studies in the contemporaneity.

It is not uncommon to find news in business journals or corporate websites dealing with investments and gains in competitiveness, from the use of applications (app). In the Brazilian case, in retail, Pão de Açúcar Supermarket Group invests in an application for the online food tradeFootnote 1. In the United States of America, Adidas brand declares an increase of more than 1000% in the average ticket in e-commerce sales, thanks to the use of the “Complete The Look”Footnote 2, an app, which offers combinations of other products, from the query of a single item, basing its combinations on consumer database.

The examples, many of them in retail, signal a transformation in the buying and selling actions, but that interfere in the logic of consumption of several segments of products and services. The calculations made by algorithms from databases shows a new social logic of consumption that puts the theme as a new challenge to be understood.

As Gillespie [9] said, in his studies, aspects of the relevance of the algorithms are identified, which can allow an understanding of the writing of this new ontic status of digital humanity. In this sense, it is possible to think of the application of these aspects of the mentioned author, from the perspective of a semio-pragmatic theory to the understanding of the algorithmic advertising signal processes of the brands in their interactions with the consumers, going beyond the technique, considering the conditions of interaction and of the production and circulation and consumption of its discursive forms.

The elements of Gillespie’s [9], propositions are: algorithms promote patterns of data inclusion through the actors; the algorithms perform calculations of anticipation and predictability of occurrences; the algorithms promote the evaluation of the relevance of occurrences with non-visible criteria of calculations; the algorithms operate the supply of objectively calculated options; there is the idea of the impartiality of the offer on the part of the algorithms, although these offers are the result of subjective processes delegated by those who conceive the algorithms; the algorithm gains the condition of directing the life of the users by performing the mixture in the entanglement of calculations of occurrences, based on the practices of public uses, allowing the conception of a predictable public.

The results of semio-pragmatic applications on these aspects are related to contributions on the logic of production and appropriation potential of the dynamic way of algorithmic advertising actions, which in turn help to think the logical narrative and discourse of consumption cultures in digital mediation.

The theoretical and methodological proposal presented here is theoretically supported in works on the media brand [2], as well as applications of semiotics to advertising and marketing in the Brazilian context [20]. Thus, a pragmatic understanding of algorithmic advertising for the cultural dynamics of consumption in its new writing mode and specific contexts, such as the Brazilian for example, is constituted.

In this sense, it should be clarified that the text will be organized in three axes, namely: the production logics and powers of appropriation of algorithmic advertising in its writing; Algorithm and suggested narratives for consumption: a socio-cultural writing; and the manifestations of risky interactions [14], adapted to relations between brands and consumers in algorithmic advertising mediation, considering the tensions between programmed, accidental interactions, manipulation, and adjustment interactions regimes.

The four possibilities of meanings of the risky interactions allow to see modalities of communicative actions between brands and consumers in the mediation of the algorithms, namely: the programmed refers to the actions determined in the affordances of the platforms of interaction of the brands with consumers; the interaction in the adjustment works the calculations of occurrences in front of the most recurrent uses of the processes of interaction brands and consumers. The manipulation considers the selection manifestation of the algorithms in front of the calculations of relevant recurrences in the interaction of consumer brands and programming interests; finally, the accident configures the interaction regimes of the order of the less predicted elements of poetic/aesthetic tone, but possible to happen, that makes the process of sense of the interactions gain some degree of unpredictability, novelty.

This perspective seeks to offer, from the theoretical point of view, a communicational reading of advertising, toward the possibilities of algorithms adjustments in realities of consumptions, which explains our option for the theory of mediations as theoretical support that makes possible to understand the contexts on digital humanities in their socio-cultural heterogeneities and permanent negotiation processes.

2 The Logics of Algorithmic Advertising in Its Writing

Advertising and multiple expressions of brands live a transmutation against their classic definitions and formats. This can be seen in texts such as those of [2, 17, 22], that brands occupy a place of media-brand in a great variety of media, crossing by discursive genres and formats that initially shows a sense of depublicitarization of brand expression that, paradoxically, hyperpublicitizes the whole environment of consumers’ lives, making the media-brand present and interacting in different ways with consumers.

Digital advertising, in this sense, reflects a new form of advertising, at the same time, revealing a new underlying expressiveness of suggestions and inductions to consumption, based on calculations of big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), because there are, on the days present, a certain predisposition of the human to delegate to the algorithm its decisions. Thus, the question can be raised: what will the advertising industry become when the algorithms calculate all consumption possibilities and AI data systems can define the consumption patterns of humanity? What will be its ontic status? Is it in the same expressiveness that we know today of the speeches of advertising and brands? There is new writing in conformation. What remains? What changes? But none of this eliminates the senses of branded experiences. Algorithms can recognize, describe, indicate, induce, but they can not experience or feel.

The previous questions pose essential challenges to communication studies for the understanding of how this algorithmic logic works in communicational terms about market and consumption. How would be the processes of production, circulation, and consumption of brands and the interactions of brands with consumers in the logic of algorithms? What would be this algorithmic writing of advertising?

At this point that we recover the valuable contribution of Gillespie [9], on the six aspects of relevance of the algorithms, mentioned in the introduction, to find possible ways of answering the presented questions, crossing the informational/communicational aspects of the six relevant elements of the algorithm versus the dimensions of production, circulation/interaction and reception/consumption.

When thinking about the production of data in algorithms, we realize that the promotion of standards for data inclusion happens through the actors. Such actors are not necessarily human since AI has data capture machines. This finding favors the dialogue with the actor-network perspective of Latour [15], which studies the actors in connection in the digital networks and their flows of meanings. That is the narrative/discursive course of the networks, as a new domain of understanding of society and culture.

It should also be thought that this pattern of the form of data inclusion is previously thought by humans, but not all actors of this big data production are human. This process corresponds to the size of the production of the communication in algorithms to perform calculations that predict probabilities of occurrences, seeking to anticipate to consumers the offers of their most recurrent consumption practices. These calculation criteria are not visible and comprise the ‘black box’ of the algorithms. Besides, there are also groundbreaking discussions on the theme such as Beer [1], that deals with the studies of algorithms beyond the technical question and thinking about their power logic in cultural life, considering the productive intentionality, materialized in software and the uses in daily consumption of these products.

Recent international papers about the subject like Bucher [13], acknowledge that studies on production in algorithms and how they work are in greater quantity than studies on their circulations and their effects, perceptions, what could be interpreted, in the last case, such as studies about the imaginary of the reception of algorithms. This is a subject little discussed in international scientific journals. See also Filho [23], about this discussion, which emphasizes that most of the studies on algorithms are demarcated in the discussion of their functionalities and applicabilities or demarcated by the interest in data privacy and the surveillance issues of the actions of social subjects, considering the ethical implications of such processes. The effects of the algorithms and their processes of appropriation in the cultures are little studied.

At any rate, this strong aspect of the social production of an algorithmic sense reinforces what Gillespie [9], identified as an “algorithmic promise of objectivity,” though idealized by the intentionality of production, but generalized in usage and consumption, since, these are based on a belief that such devices work in the perspective of an impartiality, in the sense of what they offer to consumer users as algorithmic truth. This aspect is false, because what is a selection of occurrences within commercial interests and what happens in greater probability, which also favors the commercial aspect of what is offered in the research of the data in its programmings.

The circulation/interaction and reception of the algorithm gain relevance from Gillespie’s [9], perspective by the condition of directing (manipulating) users’ lives by performing the mixture that induces, in the entanglement of occurrence calculations, from the practices of public, users-consumers, allowing the design of a predictable public. However, stays the question: what would be the level of adjustment and the accidental in the algorithmic interactions? If there is a probability of occurrence of a fact, however, small it is, this fact may occur. This aspect takes place in the third and fourth stages of this reflection, which consider the sociocultural contexts of the influence of algorithms as narratives and as forms of interactions that predict the most frequent as the central aspect of manipulation and that tends to be generalized, the merges of brand and user-consumer interactions by the cross-data that favor a revealing dynamic of the actual data flows and the accidental one that would demarcate the unusual occurrences and often out of commercial interests, but predicted as minimal or rare probabilities and also an instance of fruition or cathartic aesthetic experience.

3 Advertising Algorithm and Narratives: A Sociocultural Writing

Calculations of occurrences determined by algorithms in consumption are reflections of data interpretation. The induction or manipulation of determined occurrences happens in the interactions/circulations in the actions of users in the digital platforms toward the previous determinations of possibilities that a given platform offers to the anticipated conceptions of uses, denominated affordances. That is the concept that designates the potential of an object to be used as it was designed to be used. This understanding of the term, roughly, was offered by the psychologist Gibson [10], whose contribution stimulated reflections from design to man-machine interactions. But there are unanticipated uses and unusual occurrences that the algorithm calculus recognizes and can resize their offers and their predictability (adjustment) versus uses in realities.

This finding allows us to say that the algorithm does not act in the same way in all contexts and that the sociocultural and determinant aspect of adjustments to the cultural practices of consumption. Thus, as we study the issue of advertising and identity of Brazilian culture in 2012, realizing that the thematization and figurativization of Brazilian aspects in commercials created the identification and the link of pertinence and belongings to consumption [20], we can state that algorithm advertising also seeks the adjustments with the public which allows understanding in the perspective of Hall [11], that there are ideological processes that are specific to the contexts of interaction/communication, being a purpose of the research in the area the search for the nexus of the social production of meaning in their specific contexts, allowing us to think that through the relationship between communication and ideology there is a theoretical path to understand in practice the differences that the contexts of digital humanities can present. Moreover, the calculations in the discursive formulations, oriented to the consumers, will present thematizations and discursive figurativizations that reflect the context of identification with the culture that is inserted.

In addition to the discursive level, we perceive that, in terms of a francophone semiotics, it is as if the algorithms gave us an auxiliary narrative program that would be subordinated to a main narrative program of the big commercial brands that would be configured, in the perspective of looking for the conjunction with object of cognitive and pragmatic value of brands, profit, which in turn depends on the consumer’s narrative auxiliary program with the brand in the conquest also of an object of value (cognitive and pragmatic offered by the brand) to consumers.

From the perspective of the semiotics in Peirce, applied to advertising [19], with a view to the study of the semiosis of the senses of brands and consumers, in the mediation of the algorithm, this semiosis would be framed in the perspective of the interpretation of the data, on a scale of dynamic interpretants that would go from the occurrences of the most recurrent to the rarest and unlikely.

The formulations above, which are said in this way, make it appear that everything would be programmed in the digital world and that the sociocultural world would be determined by algorithmic logic. In a sense, this can be understood as true, but it is only one way of a complex process in tow directions. The algorithm can determine reality, but reality can also determine the algorithm. Thus, we return to the question raised in the previous section of this discussion: but how is the question of the possibility of adjustment and the accidental in the algorithmic interactions? Have the algorithms for consumption served only retail? Or the offerings of brands would inhabit the minds of consumers also in actions of an affective, cognitive order related to brands?

4 The Interactions in the Algorithmic Relations of Brands and Consumers

Landowski [14], considers that the senses carry a risk, for although there is an order or regime of programming of living to the conjunction of every living actor toward death, for all actors of the great narrative of life, there is also in the narrative process of life, facts that leave the logic of regularities, which are tensioned by a randomness that, in turn, make the tensions between logics of an intentionality that contradict each other, by the logic of the sensible and allows the adjustment for this sensitive aspect, towards an accidental possibility (event), which can be good or bad.

The author emphasizes that the semiotics, in Greimas’s proposition, was always occupied with the programmed and manipulative dimension of the senses and that it gave little space to the accidental, and the adjustment, which is the exact space of aesthetic experience, in terms of communication lived in the uses and media consumptions with cultural products, including brand messages and advertising.

Algorithms as a device of mankind do not escape this maxim. But their condition of writing is underlying as mathematical meta-language, constitutive of digital humanity, therefore, constitutive of the realities in their mediation condition, as Coudry and Hepp [4] treat, when considering data mediatization, or realities in datafication process.

The algorithm interaction considers the scheduling, manipulation, adjustment and accident regimes, the last two results of the circulation processes and the media uses and consumptions of the digital platforms and that by the AI conditions fit the possibilities of the identified data in the real dynamics of interactions.

At the same time, that such action in the uses of the algorithms, in theory, directs us hypothetically to the accidental, as Landowski [14] thinks, but in the case of commercial consumption it seems that the adjustment is always cooptated by the intentions of the intentionality of the commercial production, becoming the sequence in possibility manipulated of occurrence, when the accident interests. The mechanisms of AI seem to seek the agile overcoming of the adjustment and annulment of the accidental (not interesting), in the allotropic order of the permanent self-organization of the programming of the algorithm. This allows the occurrence of accidental as a record that tends to be incorporated or canceled.

It is important to say that in the risks of the senses, the accidental aspect can be good or bad for the brand and/or consumers. Accident as an event capable of altering the flow of narrative meaning of interactions is not necessarily a condition of digital interaction. There would be other factors that would influence the digital world out of adjustment and accidental processes.

This is why we consider Stuart Hall’s [10] studies in which one, the author presents, in his discussions of communication and ideology, the idea of communication as an interdisciplinary theoretical regionality that seeks to understand the nexus on social production of meanings between events, cultural phenomena in the face of their specific contexts.

Although the quantitative digital aspect of the mathematical ontic state of the algorithm overlaps, its calculations are the result of an appropriation of big data interpretations for specific contexts. The datafication of the world should not be understood as homogeneous as it argues Couldry and Meijas [6]. This phenomenon happens appropriately to the contexts which the data refers. Although we know that there is a tentative standardization or colonization of the algorithmic programming of consumption in the world, which constitutes a globalized Babel trying to meet the commercial interests of large international corporations and the programmed logic given as certain and regular, profitable.

On the other hand, such interests are strained by the adjustments and accidents of the local contexts of interactions, with the random, irregulars and sensitives aspects that are constituted from the uses and consumptions of the specific contexts, sometimes escaping to that programmed by affordances and demanding adjustments of the algorithm for action in specific contexts.

Today the algorithm devices find great advances in the retail sector and create links between brands and consumers in the processes of buying and selling. Databases are being fed, but there is still a path to be improved in these relationships in the field of affectivity and cognition, which form stronger linkages between brands and consumers in AI mediation.

In this sense, the study of algorithmic advertising must develop an agenda for the investigation of social production of meaning in consumer cultures that must pass through the communication, production, circulation, reception/consumption contexts, combined with an understanding of morphology, semantics, syntax and the pragmatics of the algorithms in human interactions and with their social institutions for an understanding of their logic, always glimpsing the ethical dimension, since the dimension of commercial intentions is not the only defining elements of the social environment, which is also the environment of the economy of consumption. The algorithm needs to be humanized in its purposes.

The algorithms, as we expose at the beginning of this exposition, can describe, configure, induce, predict, but can not feel. The universe of the sensible can be calculated, stimulated, described, provoked, but can not, or can not yet, be felt by the non-human. The professionalization of the advertising area requires today digital knowledge that was not relevant for two decades. However, today they are.

The new modalities of interactions mediated by digital algorithms in the consumption and in the various dimensions of the digital humanity imply to know this new language of media circulation, that is, to open the ‘black box’ for the understanding of the morphological structures that make up the base of the algorithm code, its semantic assignment forms (which means understanding the modes assign meanings, functions, values/hierarchies). These dimensions would be in the horizon of the scheduling regime, observing the regularities (including statistics) and intentionalities, for the constitution of syntax, an ordering as a basis in the occurrences and possible functions predicted for the users-consumers, that is, the affordances.

On the other hand, the determination of affordances, from the circulation in the interaction with the consumer and their form of appropriation, make it possible in the AI dynamics to adjust the algorithm to the accidental real (positive or negative for the brands), this new semantization and syntax constitutes within a pragmatic of the digital language, ‘mathematizing’ the social life.

The proposition of a semio-pragmatic discussion justifies precisely because of the ontological aspect of the digital sign, algorithm, which in its writing and narrative seeks to determine in the interface with the human, the meanings that can be established in cultural life in detriments of other possibilities.

In addition to the discussion of commercial interests, the ethical, moral intentions that constitute human relations and AI are included. What do we want from this intelligence? What consumption society do we want? The high level of regularity of interactions in commercially programmed intentions understood in their contexts can lead to a society that values the meaning of the profitable for few in the logic of production in detriment of the interests of the majority of consumer society. What consumption society do we want? Sustainable? Selfish or selfless? How to think collectively in this logic?

The algorithms will be what we program to make them work. The semio-pragmatic and cultural mediation of algorithms signs for consumption emerges as a proposal that goes through the agenda of understanding its structuring signs (morphology and semantics), its rules of order (syntax) that in the interactions of the logic of functioning (pragmatic) given in the circulations, uses and consumptions for the appropriations of subjects and institutions of social life.

These aspects are fundamental for a deeper social critique of the conformation of the digital humanities and are the essential substratum for a good dialogue with a new political economy of digital humanities communication in spite in Fuchs’ works [7, 8], about the data fetish and the consequent social criticism of media, which should be made for this positivist, administrative and often enthusiastic look at the practices of social class, economic dynamics and implications for the life of consumption that this digital presence brings, from a world given by the logic of the data, the algorithms.

This research agenda should also include, in addition to what has been commented on algorithmic language structures and processes, three approaches, namely: the first one refers to the understanding of how the ecosystem of brands is represented discursively in digital communications and in the suggestions that foresee for the uses of the algorithmic logic in the consumptions. This type of work shows in the action of the media agents of the brands a logic of the present time that confers the representative status of the digital sense to the imaginary of the social life in the lived moment. These studies can be synchronic and diachronic, allowing the comparison between the forms of representation of each temporal/spatial context and in their updates in time and space.

Hepp emphasizes the importance of synchronic and diachronic studies to understand the reality mediated by communication, by the mediatizing action of the media in time/space, that is, in the contexts in which they are circumscribed, since the synchrony reflects the actuality of the phenomenon and diachrony allows us to understand it in the confrontation with the different media configurations of previous contexts. The communicational configurations are specificities to be analyzed in their actuality and their historical senses, glimpsing possible communicational configurations in a future perspective [12].

The second aspect concerns research with users-consumers regarding the perceptions that they have about algorithms in consumption in their lives, to understand the types of the logic of appropriation of such references in daily life. This type of research is in line with Bucher’s work [3] which, as previously mentioned, discusses the imaginary of perceptions about the algorithms and puts in the screen the discussion of the effects and reception that are presented, as an approach with great potential to be explored in the field of research on the subject.

Finally, the researches on digital interactions presuppose as a constitutive process the semio-pragmatic analysis the understanding of the processes of enunciation in digital networks that would support the understanding of their logic and narrative flows. Here, Bruno Latour’s actor-network perspective is an articulating element of the narrative flows in digital networks [15]. At this way, we can observe the brands in their expressivities, not only as discourses, but as actants and actors of the process, perceiving in the semantic and syntax of these flows the narrative programs of the actants and their manifestations in discourses as actors, in the thematizations and figurativizations of discursive temporalities and spatialities manifested in the discursive updating of the platforms to interactions in networks. This process also requires understanding the enunciation as communication in productive processes, circulation and consumption and appropriation of speeches. The traditional protocol of narrative and discursive semiotics already exists and only needs adaptations to the reality of narratives and discourses of digital, algorithmic.

It should be emphasized that the field of circulation and consumption requires an anthropological competence of the culture to detect media uses and consumptions, requiring besides the socio-discursive understandings, an ethnographic and ethnological view for a full understanding of this communication mediation of the culture in digital humanity, via algorithms and individuals in their life contexts.

Only from this, it becomes possible to accumulate a set of information about the discursive formulations of algorithmic advertising and to analyze the regimes of interaction in their concrete manifestations.

5 Conclusions

On the other hand, this aspect of the volume of data creates a difficulty for the semio-pragmatic proposal, since it would not apply to the general data of a brand phenomenon, but to a reduction of consumer realities, from the selection of data better delimited, envisioning a deeper understanding of their social logics of meaning production.

This means that the semio-pragmatic perspective is limited to an understanding of medium-range phenomena, related to its contextual characteristics, which is aligned with the perspectives of studies of communication mediations as proposed by Martin-Barbero [16], because the algorithms in their communicational action would be in the centrality of the political-socio-cultural and economic life of the daily consumption realities. And the intermedialities as dimensions of cultural mediations, manifested by the logic of production and consumption and cultural matrices and industrial formats, in which these devices are embodied in cultural life, shows specific forms of the institutions of brands in their ways of generating sociabilities and cognitive processes of consumer practices, such as cultural practices, together with consumers witch, through the mediation of communication interactions, through algorithms and uses of digital platforms, presents rituals of uses and consumptions that are proper to the relational universes on the consumption of brands with their consumers in their appropriations of realities.

In this sense, we rescue the principle that advertising algorithms are constituents of consumption realities while being co-fabricated by the realities that are inserted. And the study of cultural mediations combined with the semio-pragmatic perspective of the relations brands and consumers are a privileged way to understand this phenomenology of the symbolic materiality that ideologically conforms the senses of the social, backed by a philosophical-theoretical axis in the media studies, that allows the most powerful configuration of the theoretical regionality of communication, aspect that when we start the text, was presented on the basis of Couldru and Hepp [4], which defend the philosophical-theoretical position that contemporary reality is mediated by the communication condition of the algorithm signs as a constituent element of this new conformation of realities by data.

In the view proposed here, Couldry and Heep [4], although referring to the concept of mediatization, which was not the subject of a deeper discussion of this work, may be equated with the idea of communicational mediations in cultures of Martín-Barbero [16], as we have already discussed, in Perez and Trindade [18], when we deal with the signic mediations of consumption and its philosophical-theoretical status.

The relevant aspect of this work is to demarcate a possible theoretical path of investigation in communication that seeks its space and voice, from a perspective, more adjusted to the accidental regimes that constitute the specificities of the communicational phenomena of consumption in the Brazilian context in Latin-American.