2016 marked a bad year for adtech start-ups as funding activity crashed to its lowest point in five years. Financers are becoming increasingly concerned that the fizz has fallen out of the market, reducing the likelihood of investments being made, particularly as the Facebook-Google duopoly continues to use financial and technical clout to dominate the digital advertising industry. But does this signify the beginning of the end for adtech companies as they struggle to compete with the Silicon Valley giants or can we expect an adtech renaissance in the near future?

In this first of a new series of articles we look at chatbots and how they are beginning to change the retail experience. We consider some of the key issues that need to be resolved before chatbots are more widely adopted. We also ponder what makes a chatbot successful in the eyes of a consumer.

Pokémon Go started out as an April Fools’ joke in 2014, when Google allowed users to browse Google Maps searching for and capturing the little pocket monsters. This week, the crossover between virtual life and reality became ever closer with the release of Pokémon Go, an app which allows users to roam the streets and catch Pokémon in ‘real life’.

Drawbridge is a Californian company founded by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan. Prior to Drawbridge, Kamakshi worked as a machine learning expert and Lead Scientist at AdMob.

Leveraging successful measurement techniques within advertising continues to be a hot topic this year. In turn, this has fuelled discussions around the value in measuring the emotional reaction to online ads rather than simply click rates. After all, as consumers of online advertising, we know first-hand that it is often our emotional reaction to an ad that ultimately drives us to either share something or click through to a product or service.