“AI” is the ANA’s Marketing Word of the Year for 2023, the winner in a landslide vote among 271 ANA members.

Since 2014, ANA has surveyed its members to select the ANA Marketing Word of the Year. The ANA staff identifies a list of finalists and then asks members to cast their votes to determine the winner. The survey has two questions:

1. What word should be the ANA Marketing Word of the Year?
2. Why did you vote for that word?

This year, voting was done online between November 22 and December 7. AI was the runaway winner with almost 70 percent of the 271 votes among 10 options. The next closest selection, “Purpose,” had only eight percent of votes.

In the 10-year history of the ANA Marketing Word of the Year, there has never been a winner by such a wide margin. AI is also the first repeat winner — it was the ANA Marketing Word of the Year in 2017.

Representative responses to the question “Why did you vote for ‘AI’ as the ANA 2023 Marketing Word of the Year?” included:

• AI is changing the world, in terms of marketing and business.
• Because it’s everywhere now, and I feel like it really permeated our entire world this year.
• Everyone is afraid of and/or excited about it. Everyone is talking about how to use it. But also, everyone is wondering how it won’t make them obsolete.
• AI is becoming a pervasive technology for our content creators and our consumers, with looming philosophical concerns as well as extraordinary potential for increasing efficiency for all sorts of tasks.
• Because Generative AI will be the most disruptive technology for years to come, both good and bad. Marketing teams need to address the opportunity and risks head-on to stay ahead and ensure they are putting their best, most authentic content forward for their audiences.
• In 2023 artificial intelligence took a leap that will be the foundation of how everything we do changes. If you’re not paying attention to it, you’ll be left behind.
• AI has dominated the marketing conversation this past year like nothing else. New tools, new ways of working, new terminology, and new dangers, all generated by the infusion of AI.

Previous ANA Marketing Words of the Year have been pivot (2020), personalization (2019), brand purpose (2018), transparency (2016), content marketing (2015), and programmatic (2014).