After spending 17 years managing cross-border marketing campaigns and fielding calls from international companies searching for reliable Latin American partners, Miguel de la Roca and Hugo Rodríguez decided to build a structural solution to a problem they witnessed repeatedly. The result is NegOcean, a platform designed to connect businesses outside Latin America with vetted agencies and service providers across the region through transparent bidding and evaluation mechanisms.
The platform addresses what the co-founders of Positive Agency describe as systematic friction in how international brands identify, evaluate, and engage with marketing and creative agencies throughout Latin America. Companies operating in or selling into LATAM markets often struggle to find reliable regional partners, while others overlook Latin American agencies entirely despite their ability to deliver world-class quality work, operate fluently in English, align with U.S. time zones, and cost up to 50% less than comparable agencies in the United States or Europe. While demand exists on both sides, information asymmetries, verification challenges, and trust deficits prevent many productive business relationships from forming.
The Partner Selection Problem
Companies entering Latin American markets face significant challenges when selecting business partners, including unfamiliarity with local legal systems, inability to assess reputations and capabilities, lack of information about privately held firms, and pressure to make decisions based on limited due diligence. These barriers create risk that often leads companies to work with suboptimal partners or avoid the market entirely.
De la Roca witnessed this pattern consistently throughout his career. “We would get calls from U.S. tech companies or European brands who needed to launch campaigns in Latin America but had no framework for evaluating agencies. They would ask us to recommend competitors, which we did, because the real problem was that they couldn’t tell the difference between a legitimate agency with a strong track record and one making exaggerated claims online.”
The verification gap becomes particularly acute with privately held service firms, which represent the majority of agencies operating across Latin America. Unlike publicly traded companies with audited financials and regulatory disclosures, private agencies offer limited transparency into their actual capabilities, client rosters, or performance history.
Hugo Rodríguez adds that the problem cuts both ways. “High-quality agencies across Latin America struggle to access international clients who would benefit from their expertise. The agencies have the talent and track record, but no efficient way to demonstrate credibility to brands evaluating options from thousands of miles away. That matching failure hurts everyone.”
Building Transparency Into Market Structure
NegOcean approaches the problem through a combination of verification mechanisms, standardized evaluation criteria, and structured bidding processes. Rather than functioning as a traditional directory or freelancer marketplace, the platform focuses on pre-vetting agencies against specific standards before allowing them to participate in client projects.
The verification process examines agency capabilities across multiple dimensions including years of operation, client references, portfolio documentation, team composition, and specialized expertise in particular industries or service categories. Agencies must provide verifiable information rather than self-reported claims, creating a baseline of credibility that reduces risk for companies unfamiliar with regional providers.
“We’re building the due diligence infrastructure that should exist but doesn’t,” De la Roca explains. “When a company posts a project on NegOcean, they receive proposals only from agencies we’ve verified. That immediately solves the trust problem that prevents so many international brands from working with Latin American partners.”
The platform also standardizes how agencies present their capabilities, making it easier for companies to compare proposals on equal terms rather than sorting through presentations formatted differently and emphasizing incomparable metrics.
Structured Bidding for Service Categories
NegOcean organizes projects through structured bidding processes where companies define requirements and vetted agencies submit proposals based on those specifications. The approach draws from research showing that well-designed recommendation systems and quality signals improve matching rates in B2B marketplaces, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises where information asymmetries create the greatest friction.
Companies can request proposals for specific service categories including social media management, paid media campaigns, creative development, digital analytics, website development, and content production. Each category includes standardized brief templates that ensure agencies receive the information needed to submit relevant proposals.
Rodríguez emphasizes that the platform design prioritizes quality of matches over volume of transactions. “We’re deliberately avoiding the race-to-the-bottom dynamics you see in freelancer marketplaces where the lowest bid wins regardless of capability. Our model assumes that companies want to find the right partner for their requirements, which means providing enough information to make informed decisions rather than just comparing prices.”
The bidding structure allows agencies to differentiate themselves through relevant experience, proposed approaches, and team composition rather than competing solely on cost. Companies evaluate proposals based on criteria they define as important for their specific project.
Technology Stack and Development Stage
The platform is now live and already recruiting its first clients. The technical infrastructure includes agency verification systems, project management workflows, proposal evaluation tools, and communication interfaces that allow companies and agencies to interact throughout the engagement process.
“We encourage people to try NegOcean to find agencies in LATAM—either because they have operations in LATAM, or because they believe they can find a great partner who speaks English,” says De La Roca, “They can also find agencies that can help them run ads in their own local markets, with the added advantage that hiring agencies in LATAM can deliver world-class advertising at half the budget in many cases”.
The platform will support multiple languages to serve both English and Spanish speaking companies and agencies across Latin America. Payment processing will handle multiple currencies and accommodate the billing requirements of international transactions.
Future development roadmap includes performance tracking systems that allow companies to rate agencies after project completion, creating reputation data that improves matching quality over time. These ratings will become part of each agency’s verified profile, providing social proof beyond initial credibility checks.
Market Opportunity and Timing
The timing for NegOcean reflects several converging trends. Remote work normalization has made distributed teams more acceptable to companies previously resistant to working with partners outside their geographic proximity. Nearshoring momentum continues as U.S. companies seek alternatives to Asian manufacturing and service providers, with Latin America positioned advantageously due to time zone alignment and cultural proximity.
The digital advertising market in Latin America continues expanding, creating demand for marketing services from both regional and international brands. Companies operating across multiple LATAM countries need agencies capable of coordinating campaigns at scale, exactly the type of provider NegOcean aims to surface.
“The market conditions have never been better for a platform like this,” Rodríguez says. “Five years ago, companies were more skeptical about remote partnerships. Today, distributed collaboration is standard practice. The question is no longer whether to work with teams in other countries, but how to find the right partners and manage those relationships effectively.”
Drawing from Operational Experience
The credibility of NegOcean stems partly from the operational experience de la Roca and Rodríguez bring as founders of Positive Agency. Over 17 years, they have managed campaigns for global brands including Canon, Volvo Trucks, and Sodimac while operating with distributed teams across Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile.
This hands-on experience informs practical aspects of platform design. They understand what information companies actually need to evaluate agencies, what verification steps matter most for assessing credibility, and which service categories require specialized expertise versus general marketing capabilities.
“We’re not building this from theory,” Rodríguez notes. “We’ve been on both sides of these conversations hundreds of times. We know what questions U.S. companies ask when evaluating Latin American partners. We know what agencies need to demonstrate to win that trust. The platform is designed around solving real problems we’ve encountered repeatedly.”
The founders also bring relationships within Latin America’s marketing ecosystem, having collaborated with numerous agencies across the region throughout their careers. These connections will be valuable for recruiting quality agencies to the platform during initial launch phases.
Broader Implications for Regional Development
If successful, NegOcean could influence how service businesses throughout Latin America access international markets beyond just marketing and creative services. The verification mechanisms and bidding structures could extend to software development agencies, consulting firms, or other professional services where similar information asymmetries prevent efficient matching.
“The fundamental problem we’re solving exists across multiple industries,” Rodríguez concludes. “Any service category where companies outside Latin America need to find reliable regional partners faces the same trust and verification challenges. If we can prove the model works for marketing agencies, it creates a template that could help unlock access for other sectors as well.”
Even now, after the launch, the focus remains on demonstrating value for the marketing and creative sectors where the founders have deepest expertise. The development timeline targets a public launch within the coming months, after which the real test begins of whether transparent matching infrastructure can overcome the systemic friction that has long separated international demand from Latin American supply.
