Like the web, mobile apps and vinyl records, chatbots have been declared dead countless times only to prove very much alive — in that artificial way.

Some have blamed a lack of AI for the abundance of disappointing chatbots, while

Influencer marketing has become all the rage in an industry where social media is increasingly at the epicenter. The early days of influencer marketing were characterised by a less than structured approach and lacked what would usually be considered a stitched-up strategy. Then larger brands began dabbling in the space under the advice and counsel of third-party influencer marketing specialists, who brought methodology to the process. The net result was a rise in...

Not quite the dignified end we would have expected for Google’s long-ailing social network, Google+ is finally being closed down following a software breach that left hundreds of thousands of users’ private data exposed.

Up to 500K users were allegedly affected by a software bug in the Google+ API, which meant data that people had believed to be private was made accessible to third parties.

According to an internal memo at Google published by the Wall Street Journal, the search giant had been...

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...

Nearly half (41%) of businesses with 100+ employees invest more than $500K in digital marketing every year. That’s according to a US-based survey of 501 marketers by small business publisher The Manifest, at least, in a study which set out to discover how companies invest in digital marketing, and how their investments are set to change in the year ahead.

While respondents hailed from a wide mix of seniority levels and companies, more than three-quarters (76%) agreed that marketing has changed more in...

One third of all global ad spend growth will be driven by paid search and social media spend within the next two years, according to the latest report by Publicis-owned industry forecaster Zenith.

Annual global ad spend is on track to hit $581bn (£442bn) by the end of 2018, while Zenith raised its predictions for global ad spend growth from 4.1% to 4.5% until 2020, 67% of which will come from investments in paid search and social media ads.

Within that time, paid search will grow by $22bn...

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...

A brand’s success stands or falls on its public perception. There is a direct correlation between the trust that customers and the general public have in a brand and its overall profits. Social media has revolutionised not only the way that brands engage with customers and the public at large, but also the way that they operate and succeed... or fail.

In the UK alone there are currently

When WhatsApp unveiled its new Business API last week, most tech reporters determined Facebook was getting serious about monetising the chat app it purchased for $19bn in 2014.

They’re probably right about the money, but wrong about where it’s most likely to come from.

As another busy summer winds down, retailers are preparing for those consumers that hit reset on certain aspects of their life by making thoughtful changes to their routines. People often think of this particular time of the year as going ‘Back to Life’ and an ideal time for starting fresh habits and making new purchasing decisions. It’s also a mindset that retailers can leverage beyond the usual back to school push.

We continue to see the gap between online and offline shopping close as...