The unthinkable has happened. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has culminated in Facebook being slapped with a fine to the tune of £500k – the maximum possible under the pre-GDPR Data Protection Act. For Zuck the mighty tech deity, the chickens have truly come home to roost. Or have they? Zuckerberg probably made more than that in the time it has taken to read this sentence…

But should GDPR...

The wave of GDPR panic that overwhelmed many digital marketers at the start of the year, has been cited as the reason why UX – and therefore the resulting customer experience (CX) – seems to have gone out of the window for many brands. For others, it is the hunger for leads that has made it almost impossible to navigate some websites without encountering a wall of data capture forms that prevent any action whatsoever.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Tech Lab has announced a blockchain-based protocol that allows companies to track consent users’ personal data.

PrivacyChain, which has been released for public comment and a handful of early pilots, seeks to hand consumers control over the personal information provided to companies using the technology.

If those users choose to opt in, their data will be made available to retailers, and the advertising agencies, publishing partners and exchanges that...

Today’s education and training systems are not keeping up with the current demand for skills and the emergence of new technologies, and the result is a widening skills gap that threatens to hamper $11.5T in global growth.

That’s according to an analysis by the global management and professional services firm Accenture, which concludes that new approaches to learning are desperately needed if businesses are to achieve the growth...

Personalisation is a necessary component of customer experience in today’s environment. Providing individualised experiences promises to drive sales and increase loyalty by making each customer feel as if the brand knows them and can anticipate their needs.

Yet many companies still struggle to get this right. What can you do to ensure that your...

As if Facebook needed another mountain in user trust to climb this year, evidence has now emerged of it using phone numbers provided for security purposes to target unsuspecting users with ads.

The activity was uncovered by researchers from Northeastern University and Princeton, along with the tech publisher Gizmodo, following controlled trials where an ad was successfully targeted using phone numbers that had been provided for account security and, in one case, had never been explicitly provided to the...

I recently moved into a new home and in a two-month stretch spent a significant amount of money on Amazon.com buying numerous furnishings, decorator items and appliances.

It struck me that despite being a loyal customer and Prime member, Amazon never figured out I was moving nor suggested any items or services I might consider for my new home. I wasn’t offered any...

Global marketing spend is booming, according to a new study by marketing intelligence firm Warc, and traditional media is “paying the price”.

According to the group’s Martech: 2019 and Beyond survey based on responses from more than 800 brands and agencies in the UK, North America, Asia Pacific (APAC) and continental Europe, spend on martech is now worth an estimated $99.9bn (£76bn).

In the UK and North America, brands upped their budgets on marketing technology - email and social...

A former 19th century-commodity exchange standing bold, brick-red, but very much at home in the dead centre of Amsterdam, the Beurs van Berlage seemed a fitting home for #DMWF Europe (Digital Marketing World Forum) 2018.

It was a conference that held a pervasive frankness around industry shortcomings, a respect for tradition and legacy, and a crucial but measured awareness of how the digital world is evolving around us. If there was one lesson to be learned from #DMWF...

There’s a galactic amount of data being produced on social media, but the ability to categorise it into meaningful information is “near impossible” without Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is the challenge that Crimson Hexagon is taking on, and a brief demo of its abilities at #DMWF by senior sales executive Yugen Moodley shows the “deep insights” platform is doing a scarily good job.

Crimson uses a combination of Natural Language Processing, image recognition and sentiment...