Google rolled out its BERT update in October 2019 — a natural-language model that finally let search understand a full query in context instead of matching keywords one by one, quietly reshaping search more than most marketers have noticed yet.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Chief Marketing Officer, ThisCom
Led marketing strategy for clients across the United States and Europe through the shifts in social advertising, mobile, content marketing, programmatic media, and marketing automation.
That breadth of channels meant tracking BERT's rollout alongside everything else, since even a quiet algorithm change could shift how client content performed in search.
- 02
Founder, SparkToro
Left Moz in 2018 to found SparkToro, an audience-research tool, and kept publishing widely followed marketing commentary through 2019.
Starting a new company gave his commentary a fresh angle: less about SEO tactics specifically, more about how marketers actually find and understand their audiences.
- 03
Senior SEO Scientist, Moz
Co-emceed MozCon with Cyrus Shepard and became a go-to voice on machine learning's role in search.
Her machine-learning background made her one of the clearer translators of what BERT actually changed under the hood, at a point when most coverage stayed surface-level.
- 04
Founder, SEER Interactive
Kept building SEER Interactive's reputation for audience-first strategy.
As search algorithms grew more language-aware, his long-standing argument for starting with real audience research over pure keyword targeting looked more validated than ever.
- 05
Content strategy consultant
Was a leading voice in content strategy consulting.
Her structured-content philosophy remained relevant as voice assistants and smart displays added yet another surface brands had to serve the same content to.
- 06
Founder & CEO, Holistic Email Marketing
Advised global brands on email strategy through Holistic Email Marketing.
Her consulting kept pushing brands to treat email as connected to the rest of their marketing, rather than a channel run in its own separate silo.
- 07
Email marketing researcher
Researched and wrote on email deliverability and lifecycle strategy.
His research kept giving email marketers a technical grounding in why campaigns landed in the inbox or the spam folder, beyond just subject-line advice.
- 08
Founder, Convince & Convert
Built Convince & Convert's reputation in content and customer experience.
His push to treat customer service as a marketing function, not a separate department, kept gaining traction as social media blurred the line between the two.
- 09
CEO, VaynerMedia
Kept scaling VaynerMedia and publishing widely on social strategy.
His platform-native content philosophy, unusual when he first argued for it, had by now become the accepted default approach most agencies followed.
- 10
Co-founder, Structured
Was building Structured into a leading ecommerce email marketing agency.
Focusing specifically on ecommerce email gave Structured a depth of flow and segmentation expertise that generalist agencies rarely matched.
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.