Which tech startups are going to become more relevant to the way advertisers and marketers do their jobs in 2016? Discover Media House has compiled a list of which ones it thinks should be on your radar, and they focus less on the best way to serve ads online and more on assisting with other pieces of the marketing puzzle.

Discover Media House is an automated media platform that launched last year, which also maintains a database of marketing technology companies and media suppliers operating in Canada and for Canadian companies. It used that database, cross-referenced with similar ones like Angel List and Crunch Base, to examine key performance indicators the startup community looks at, such as followers, marketplace activity, major funding received over the last year, press coverage and age.

On the one hand, there are companies like Klue, a data-collection tool that creates insights about a company’s competitors. Steve Lowry, founder of Discover Media House, describes Klue as being in “stealth mode” but has a lot of buzz around it because of the involvement of Jason Smith, former customer intelligence platform Vision Critical president.

On the other hand, there are ones like social conversation analysis tool Cluep, which has relatively few followers but has received a high degree of praise for its capabilities among people who have used it.

Lowry says while the idea behind the list was, in part, to cover a variety of different kinds of services, one trend he has seen in the most buzzed-about companies is the move away from “adtech” (inputting desired audience results and receiving relevant inventory that will allow users to serve an ad) to what might be better described as “marketing tech.”

“That means taking more of a big picture approach, using something like AI to serve different needs in the marketing mix, or moving up the chain in terms of who they serve, like up to the CMO,” Lowry says. “The trend is broader than just finding ways to serve ads.”

An example of that is the company at the top spot, Allocadia, which lets CMOs use cloud capabilities to analyze, automate and manage their budgets and discover insight about the ways they are being used. There’s also Granify, an e-commerce tool that uses AI to analyze online behaviour and identify objections that could stop the online shopping process for specific consumers, then automatically serves them with a message to address that concern.