The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has selected “Artificial Intelligence (AI)” as the Marketing Word of the Year. The selection was made by a vote of ANA members from a list of finalists determined by ANA staff. Voting was done online during the week of November 27, and 403 ANA members participated.

Examples of artificial intelligence include cognitive computing (e.g., IBM’s Watson), driverless cars, voice-enabled digital assistants (e.g., Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Now) and recommendation engines. Artificial intelligence is also used in marketing automation, programmatic ad buying, chat bots and customer service.

Other top choices in the 2017 Marketing Word of the Year voting were “transparency,” the 2016 Marketing Word of the Year; “content marketing,” the 2015 Marketing Word of the Year; and “influencer.”

“Programmatic” was the 2014 Marketing Word of the Year, the first year the ANA conducted the survey.