Paul Adams made the bold move of leaving Facebook as its global head of brand design to join a startup called Intercom in 2013. Now product lead at Intercom, Adams oversees design and research initiatives like Educate, which creates bots that act like humans. "For as long as I've been in this game, people have looked for some silver bullet solution to the fundamental challenge of sending the right message to the right person at the right time," Adams said. People are complex, he said, adding that the "unsexy truth that you won't hear from agencies who want to sell you the latest trend is that there are many tools that you need to use and have them work together. It's hard work."

It's not easy marketing the marketing tech, but that's where Marissa Hayes Aydlett finds herself at Appboy, a marketing software company that helps brands manage their customers, data and messaging across the latest platforms and digital spaces.

She runs a 20-person marketing team charged with traditional marketing goals--driving customer acquisition and shaping branding -- for a nontraditional company. To do so, Aydlett is selling the story of Appboy, which underwent a rebrand in the past year while also launching its first global campaign. The goal is to educate brands about the value of offering unique experiences to customers and doing that at scale through use of technology, Aydlett says.

Jason Bell is referred to by his colleagues as "the Martech MacGyver," because he loves fixing client problems, but the challenges are becoming increasingly complex as the tech landscape continues to fragment. To solve this, Bell developed 360i's "Tech Sherpas" consulting practice, which assesses tech stacks, determines if they're optimized and builds tailored gap technology where enterprise solutions leave voids. He also created display ad solutions that can validate creative assets. And Bell's product development knowledge has enabled the agency's Contextual Action Platform technology, which has powered campaigns like Red Roof Inn's "Converting Brake Lights Into Rested Nights," Canon's "Photo Coach" and Pernod Ricard's "Winter Weather."

Marc Dispensa's first marketing technology venture was NetGI, later sold to IPG Mediabrands, where he went on to form the Technology Group. He later founded the digital consultancy iRgonomic to help healthcare companies develop gamification and mobile apps. That company, in turn, was bought by Salesforce's Magnet 360. Then, as Dispensa watched IBM's Watson innovate in healthcare, he saw an opportunity for artificial intelligence in marketing. That led to Equals 3 and the introduction of Lucy, which uses 10 Watson application programming interfaces for market research, segmentation and planning. Equals 3 won an IBM 2016 award as one of the most innovative independent software vendor partners of the year.

Mark Ellis has a unique background that includes stints at Google, Disney and the Pentagon. He's now CEO of Liftoff, a mobile app marketing platform that aims to upend how brands like eBay, Amazon, Target and Coca-Cola pay for ads. Brands pay on a cost-per-action model, meaning brands pay only when customers complete a revenue-generating action, rather than for every click or download completion. Ellis said he believes his model will eventually become an industry standard. "People genuinely like to try out a game before downloading the app," Ellis said. "Marketers of non-gaming apps are just now discovering how effective interactive ads can be for acquiring users with high retention rates," he said. The Princeton and Harvard Business School grad has doubled his staff, increased revenue 260% in one year and attracted executive-level talent from Twitter.

The idea at Tom Edwards' agency practice, formed at the data-driven marketing company Epsilon in January with partners including IBM Watson and Amazon's Alexa Voice Service, is to work in facts instead of theory, according to the company. That means his design team of strategists, brand planners and data scientists tap Epsilon's extensive proprietary data reserves, as well as unstructured data ingested with machine-learning techniques, to maximize the resulting insights' resilience in the real world. Those insights combine with the team's prototypes for both software and hardware that clients such as Nature's Way and Del Monte can use for conversational experiences, augmented intelligence and mixed-reality executions.

Peter Fader is a professor in the marketing department at the Wharton School and co-founder of Zodiac. He spent decades researching "customer lifetime values," a concept that's become dear to brands that need to quantify their consumers and justify their marketing spending. Fader has put his understanding of the consumer to use by developing marketing software. Zodiac's software helps brands tell the difference a between high-value and low-value consumer, and other insights. Zodiac has been working with a number of Facebook marketers like Dressbarn and Wahoo Fitness, acquiring new customers through campaigns on the social network. "If we don't see our martech investments truly enhancing the value of our customers and helping us acquire valuable new ones, then these investments are probably not worthwhile," Fader says.

Vanessa Krumb believes messaging apps and voice-activated assistants are what's next for marketing tech. "We'll see the beginning of martech experimenting in the 'smart-assistant' category," Krumb said. Revere.ai is a startup tech company that is trying to help businesses use artificial intelligence to decipher their data, which is coming from more touchpoints than ever, like Amazon Alexa and Google Home apps. Rever.ai is even working with its customers through messaging on platforms like Slack, giving agencies and brands notifications about campaigns directly into their work apps. "We'll see more martech itself using conversational UI's to engage with customers," Krumb said.

Carl Marci, who founded Innerscope Research in 2006, is a pioneer in neuromarketing -- plumbing consumers' unconscious reactions to ads. When Nielsen acquired Innerscope in 2015, he led consolidation of other units to form Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience. That, in turn, led to the June 2016 launch of Video Ad Explorer, a suite using electroencephalography, biometrics, facial coding, eye tracking and self-reporting by consumers to predict sales impact of advertising. In a major study with Nielsen Catalina Solutions and CBS, Marci's team tested 60 ads from 20 packaged-goods categories to show integrating neuroscience measures can explain 77% of in-store sales results.

Duncan McCall would be his own best target audience. He's a daily commuter from Connecticut to Grand Central, he's an entrepreneur and he's a prolific media consumer. "If I'm caught on the subway, I'll bring up Pocket to read articles I've saved," McCall said. "I also have a heavily curated Flipboard account and customized Reddit account for topical information." McCall co-founded PlaceIQ, a location-focused marketing technology firm that helps brands advertise to audiences based on criteria like the length of people's commutes. The industry has been hearing about the promise of "people-based marketing" for years. "Unfortunately, we still live in a world where digital ads can miss the mark in terms of relevancy," McCall said. "Consumers still receive massive amounts of TV and digital ads that don't make sense for them. It continues to be nonsensical for brands to pay for [irrelevant] ads; that always alienates potential buyers."

Seth Mills' mantra is "If it doesn't exist, let's make it." During one pitch, the director-data strategy and creative tech at TBWA/Chiat/Day created a hairbrush with a heat sensor to show consumers when they would need to use a specific haircare product. He also helped develop a data management platform that predicted answers to questions before a CMO could ask anything. The former skateboard company CEO and locksmith also helped the shop build a structure that combines technology architecture, data strategy and business problem solving, which has benefited clients such as MasterCard, Airbnb and Accenture.

In 2006, Andy Monfried survived a brush with death in a bombing in Israel, and since then has said he is motivated by a fervor for change. He channeled that energy into data and marketing with Lotame, a company that has for more than a decade been pioneering the data management platform and helping brands and publishers start to make sense of their audiences. Last year, the company took data management to its next platform -- TV.

To that end, Monfried and Lotame have launched a TV DMP for local and national broadcasters to give advertisers targeting capabilities across screens.

Elizabeth Orr prefers to be called Lisa, and that should clue you in right away: This data scientist appreciates simplicity. There's no shortage of complications in the tech- and data-centric world of mobile marketing, but Urban Airship's Orr has a knack for evaluating algorithms and training machine-learning models to predict mobile app churn and then turn them into applicable performance benchmarks and understandable trend reports. Removing complexities to produce digestible data analysis and insights on push notification opt-ins and in-app messaging, says Orr, makes for simple and justifiable answers to marketing questions.

Mark Osborne can move from creating solutions that integrate data management platforms and identity data with multi-touch attribution to using a client's existing partners to simplify martech stacks. Osborne, who can be found sharing industry information about marketing technology on LinkedIn, believes attribution will reach its tipping point in 2017. He says that marketers using data-driven attribution beyond last click will double, hinting that it will become standard across large and medium businesses. "With this shift to data-driven decision-making, marketers will get their house in order in regard to data, enabling even more innovation," said Osborne.

Kim Perell was already a major marketing tech player as CEO of Amobee, a unit of Asian telecommunications giant Singtel. Then in February, she led the acquisition of Turn, a leading data-management and demand-side platform, to create one of the largest independent programmatic buying platforms, with more than 800 employees in 20 global offices serving more than 1,000 agencies and brands. In addition to partnerships with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest, Amobee also recently became one of the first Snapchat advertising application program interface partners. Perell also is an angel investor, taking stakes in more than 60 companies, 12 of which have been acquired.

Foursquare has come a long way since it was merely a check-in app. Company President Steven Rosenblatt ensured that with new innovations and a culture that supports and rewards risk taking. "You have to constantly invent the future for survival, and speed is key," he said. In the past year, Rosenblatt has guided Foursquare in its development of a campaign measurement service that gauges foot traffic based on mobile location data, and Pilgrim SDK, which embeds the company's contextual awareness and analytics technology into other publishers' apps.

Brands like Nordstrom, Dunkin' Donuts and L'Oréal, as well as celebrities like Kevin Hart, all created campaigns using Vivian Rosenthal's Snaps platform, a mobile messaging solution for brands. The company's work spans everything from chatbots to stickers and even emojis. Last year, Snaps saw 1 billion engagements. Rosenthal says chatbots, iMessage and AI will be the biggest trends in 2017. Rosenthal has also spoken at TEDx Talks, SXSW and Advertising Week.

What makes a cross-channel marketing analytics firm stand out among the countless martech platforms out there? Ran Sarig admits that its unmistakable similarity to the cartoon "Futurama" helps people remember Datorama's name, but it's what's under the hood that counts. Last year, he led the company toward integrations of its analytics platform with Slack as well as LiveRamp's platform for targeting and measuring campaigns based on individualized, authenticated consumer IDs. Even more cutting-edge, he guided Datorama's integration with Amazon Alexa, so now clients can "ask Datorama" how their campaigns are performing while they wait for that Domino's pizza to arrive.

Molly Schweickert was thrust into a political campaign unlike any other when candidate Donald Trump began working with Cambridge Analytica, where she and her team developed a data-centric targeting methodology for the campaign's digital ads. As the data and digital marketing firm branches out from the beltway to the world of corporate brand clients, Schweickert learned some important lessons from her 2016 election work that will guide her approach with those clients outside of politics: Throw out the playbook, be authentic and remember that people aren't just a pile of data points.

As brands adopt location data-based tools for ad targeting and measuring campaigns, Placed founder and CEO David Shim is among the innovators in the space. The company's metrics, used for gauging the effects of mobile, digital and even TV advertising on actual visits to physical locations such as department stores and movie theaters, have been adopted by agencies such as IPG Mediabrands and media sellers like AccuWeather and Pandora. Now, as advertisers grow more accustomed to thinking about location data beyond mere immediate proximity, Shim is helping define the technologies they'll use as they become more sophisticated.

Bob Stutz is regarded as a bit of a legend when it comes to CRM. He joined Salesforce as CEO of Marketing Cloud in 2016 and has spearheaded its Einstein AI efforts, as well as shifting the company's focus from targeting b-to-b companies to targeting consumers. Last year, he oversaw the acquisition of Krux for $700 million. "Now that we are embarking on this whole b-to-c piece, everybody shares the same vision and we're working as a team to make sure it works," Stutz said. "For us, it is all about the customer at the end of the day. When you put the customer first, it makes a huge difference in how you act and build."

Pharmaceutical companies collect, aggregate and analyze an astronomical amount of data, but Closerlook helps them understand, digest and act on those findings. Michael Tapson, chief technology officer at Tapson, has spearheaded efforts involving machine-learning tech that simulates the outcomes of multichannel campaigns, so it might not come as a surprise he believes that will be the biggest trend in 2017. "Marketers don't stand a chance in understanding the volume and diversity of data that have been collected without utilizing machine learning," he said. "The intelligence gained will be a very powerful competitive advantage, but the finding the combination of domain expertise, technical acumen and reliable data will continue to be challenging for many."

Sunil Thomas is going global with CleverTap, after forming the company in India in 2013 and making inroads in North America. The marketing startup is focused on the app ecosystem and helping brands get in front of audiences on mobile. Most important, CleverTap is trying to help marketers understand their own users through their brand's apps, their most direct route into mobile devices. With all the data coming on mobile users, brands need to make the best decision on when to message their customers. It's all about acquiring users and customers in a sustainable way.

"I see CMOs being held more accountable for measurable [return on investment]," Thomas said. "With this goal, marketing departments will focus more on programs for sustained growth rather than executing quick-win user-acquisition campaigns. They'll be able to allocate resources more strategically, with an eye on retaining a segment of users who are sustainable over the long term."

There's a direct correlation between the rise of marketing technology platform's like Ryan Urban's BounceX and brand marketers seeking to move away from the duopoly that is Google and Facebook. BounceX, a cloud-based behavioral marketing software company, has attracted an increasing number of advertisers who want a one-to-one, holistic view of their customers and are moving away from audience segments and basic profiles. "Marketers will weed out the nonperformers as margins shrink and budgets tighten," Urban said. "The companies that will be able to compete are not the hot, shiny new add-ons. The companies that have the potential to challenge the channel duopoly are the ones that place emphasis on performance above all else, and have the track record to consistently prove it."

For the last 20 years, Jeriad Zoghby has focused on designing and developing decision management platforms for real-time personalization and customer value management. He and his team help clients, such as Melia and Carnival, increase response rates, revenue and loyalty by creating bespoke marketing and experiences for every customer. During his time at Accenture, Zoghby has grown personalization into a $600 million business unit. The company's personalization patents have skyrocketed to more than 235, and in March, Zoghby and his team developed a next-generation personalization solution called the Accenture Genome, which marks the shift from tracking what customers do to why they do it.