The digital marketing experts featured for 2016 are Dr. Pete Meyers, Wil Reynolds, Andy Crestodina, Gary Vaynerchuk, Karen McGrane, Aaron Wall, Eric Enge, Mari Smith and Amy Landino.
What changed in digital marketing in 2016
Instagram launched Stories on August 2, 2016, a near-direct copy of Snapchat's format that ended up reshaping how brands and creators approached everyday content, favoring frequent, disposable posts over the polished feed grid.
9 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Dr. Pete Meyers
Marketing Scientist, Moz
Moz's longtime Marketing Scientist, best known for building MozCast, a daily "weather report" tracking Google SERP volatility.
MozCast gave SEOs a rare independent way to tell whether a ranking swing they saw was a real algorithm update or just noise.
- 02
Wil Reynolds
Founder, SEER Interactive
Spoke at MozCon 2016 on "Putting Trust into Domain Authority," arguing that authority metrics are a trust signal rather than a pure ranking number.
The talk pushed back on a common misreading of Moz's own metric, at a time when many SEOs treated Domain Authority as if it were a direct Google ranking factor.
- 03
Andy Crestodina
Co-founder & CMO, Orbit Media
Continued publishing widely shared content strategy research through Orbit Media.
Orbit's own annual blogging surveys turned into some of the industry's most-cited benchmark data, since so few agencies published their research this openly.
- 04
Gary Vaynerchuk
CEO, VaynerMedia
Was scaling VaynerMedia and pushing brands toward native, platform-first content.
His argument that content needed a different format for every platform, rather than one asset reused everywhere, was still a hard sell to brands used to a single TV-style campaign.
- 05
- 06
Aaron Wall
Creator, SEO Book
Kept SEO Book running as an independent, subscriber-funded resource.
Thirteen years running the site on subscriber funding, rather than ads or vendor sponsorship, kept its advice unusually blunt about tactics that didn't work.
- 07
Eric Enge
Founder, Stone Temple Consulting
Runs Stone Temple Consulting, the SEO and content marketing agency he's built into one of the field's most established names.
Two decades of consulting by this point has made Stone Temple's research-driven approach a reference point clients keep coming back to, well beyond its size as a firm.
- 08
Mari Smith
Facebook marketing consultant
Continued as one of the most visible voices on Facebook marketing strategy.
As Facebook's organic reach for pages kept declining, her consulting increasingly focused on helping brands adapt to a platform that now expected them to pay for visibility.
- 09
Amy Landino
Video marketing & personal branding consultant
Was building a following around video marketing and personal branding on YouTube.
Treating her own channel as a working case study gave her video marketing advice a credibility that purely theoretical consulting couldn't match.
Also featured in 2023
This page is an independent editorial mention published by Digital Business Marketing. The numbering above is a browsing order, not a formal award, contest, vote, or ranking, and inclusion does not imply any named person endorses Digital Business Marketing.
