The writing has been on the wall for some time. But where it once spelled out Yahoo, it now says Altaba. The Yahooligans are no more. Bereft of life, they rest in peace. Marissa Mayer may be riding off into the Silicon Valley sunset with her golden parachute trailing behind.

The whole of CES was buzzing with AI promises, debates, and showcases.The only thing is, I don't think we are really talking about artificial intelligence.

Technology is starting to transform marketing, starting with how enterprises talk to consumers. We have websites, ecommerce, email and mobile apps. It's so much easier for customers and marketers to proactively connect than ever before. Now that we have all of these digital touch-points and databases, marketers and their corporate information officers and finance officers are looking for models to organize and manage all of these marketing and advertising activities. And, quite naturally, they are looking for guidance to models that worked on other parts of their business. Not surprisingly, many have focused on what has worked for their supply …

The buzzword at CES, and what will probably be the buzzword for all of 2017, is "A.I." I guess I should actually refer to this as the buzz-acronym, since A.I. stands for artificial intelligence - but in terms of our industry, it should refer to automated intelligence. A.I. for marketing is about automating simple tasks that allow us to free up more of our time to be strategic, effective, and less iterative. There's nothing really artificial about it. It's about saving time and improving processes.

We're running out of alphabet. The latest generation is Generation Z. They were born between 1995 and 2012, at least according to one demographic primer. So, what do we call the generation born from 2013 on? Z+One? Do we go with an Excel-naming scheme and call it Generation AA?

In December, I was fortunate enough to attend a session with about 30 World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) global marketing procurement leaders. Due to the spacing of the holidays I did not have a chance to write about the event until now. Instead I had two weeks off. But given that this is about predictions for 2017, I think now is as good a time as any.

I attended a funeral today. I knew him casually. We frequented many of the same social and business circles, and had had more than one good chat about our social and political environment. But we had never graduated to the category of close friendship. So it was wonderful to hear from his father, from his sister, from his daughter, from his childhood friends. Over an hour and a half, I got to know him better. I got to know how successful he was. How loved and respected he was. How tortured he was. He had taken his own life. He …

Telling a story is not easy. Telling a story in 120 seconds is even more difficult. During this past New Year's Eve celebration, Google ran a two-minute TV spot that collectively closed the door on one of the most divisive and disruptive years in recent history. I am a fan of great creative and great storytelling and when I see it, I have to call it out. This was one of those examples.

If 2016 was nothing else, it was a watershed year for the concept of branding. In the previous 12 months, we saw a decoupling in the two elements we have always believed make up brands. As fellow Spinner Cory Treffiletti saidrecently:"You have to satisfy the emotional quotient as well as the logical quotient for your brand. If not, then your brand isn't balanced, and is likely to fall flat on its face."