MarTech Today’s Top 5 News Stories Of 2016: Machine learning, beacons are dead, AI & more

As Barry Levine recently wrote, what a year it’s been for the martech industry. His recent story was all about the biggest martech developments of 2016 — the news that mattered most and had the biggest impact across the martech industry.

Here at MarTech Today, we’ve been around now for about 2 1/2 months, and we’re thrilled with the response we’ve had! Although we’ve been covering martech in depth for some time now on our sister site, Marketing Land, it’s clear that giving the martech industry a dedicated website has been a hit.

With that in mind, we thought it would be fun to share a list of the most popular martech content that we’ve covered since our mid-October launch. Tomorrow in this space, you’ll find a list of the most popular columns we published and the stories that earned the most engagement on social media. Today, however, let’s start with a look at the five most popular news stories of the year.

MarTech Today’s Most Popular News Stories Of 2016

This list is based on page views and includes news stories published between our October 17 launch and December 19, 2016.

1. Google Cloud announces new machine learning features for enterprise use

Danny Sullivan, November 15: “Are you a big business that’s been thinking you’d like some of that machine learning stuff to help with finding job applicants, doing translation, discovering linkages in data, or maybe building your own knowledge graph? Google’s got new offerings out today to help with those and more.”

2. ‘Beacons are dead,’ says CEO of a retail analytics firm

Barry Levine, November 29: “Beacons offer greater granularity than GPS, but Franson pointed out that it’s not common customer behavior to check a smartphone at each new point in a store to see if there’s some new product info or discount coupon about this display. In other words, beacons are a high-resolution solution to a problem that doesn’t yet exist, for a behavior that consumers don’t yet have.”

3. If you’re in the US, this marketing data company has a psychological profile on you

Barry Levine, October 17: “Each resulting profile, the company says, contains between one thousand and five thousand data points from the various layers. Cambridge Analytica has a real-name profile for ‘every adult consumer in the US,’ Tayler said, as well as some profiles in other countries. For ad targeting, the company’s profiles are anonymized and made available to data management platforms (DMPs), but real identities are used for direct mail and political campaigns.”

4. What’s happening with the cinemagraph?

Barry Levine, November 15: “The evidence is that a number of brands have used the format, sometimes experimentally and sometimes repeatedly as an eye-catching tool for such contexts as mobile news feeds in social media. In general, the results of user engagement indicate that cinemagraphs have unique appeal and will likely continue as a niche format.”

5. AI’s star grows brighter in marketing, with new announcements from Amazon, Facebook, and Emarsys

Barry Levine, December 2: “Artificial intelligence (AI), which has had a supporting role in the saga of marketing tools, is now becoming a star. Several new announcements point to AI becoming as much a standard feature in marketing tools as the cloud, helping to move the age of cognitive marketing closer.”

Those are the most-read news stories of the year — well, the 2 1/2 months that we’ve been online — here on MarTech Today. In case you missed it, we already published the top 10 news stories of 2016 on Marketing Land and the top 10 news stories on Search Engine Land.

On behalf of the MarTech Today editorial team, thanks for reading us during 2016. Happy holidays to you and best wishes for 2017!