It’s that time of year. The northern hemisphere is looking forward to spring. The southern hemisphere can’t wait to fall. And everyone in martech and marketing looks forward to the annual Stackie Awards.
This will be ours 10th edition of The Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Wow, a decade of hundreds of martech stack slides: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. We’d love for you to join this martech community tradition with us this year.
To enter the 2024 Stackie Awards, all you need to do is create a single slide (16:9 aspect ratio) depicting your marketing stack — the collection of martech software you use. Your slide can be as simple or as elaborate as you like. The best slides successfully convey a clear idea of how to organize the stack and how to adapt it to your marketing functions.
Then simply upload your slide by April 26, 2024. There is no charge for entry. Instead, we’ll make a $100 donation to UNICEF for every legal stack brought in, up to a total of $10,000. We will announce the winners at a #MartechDay web event on May 7, 2024 and release a deck of all submitted slides.
“So wait, your title says everybody wins?”
Well, only five entries will be chosen as the winning stacks: the ones we subjectively believe contributed the most to the community. But everyone wins because we all learn from the full collection of stack illustrations: what do stacks look like at different companies and how do they think about them? Martech sellers win by recognizing the stack slides their customers share. And the donations made to UNICEF on behalf of these entries go some way to helping things more important than any stack.
Airstream, Autodesk, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Nationwide, Paychex, Philips, Sargento, SAS, United Healthcare, Verizon, Washington Post and Whirlpool are some of the well-known brands that have shared their stacks on The Stackies. For example, here is the entry from Juniper Networks in 2021:
Or, for a B2C example, this entry from Casey’s in 2023:
Or, one more example, this one from Rabobank in 2022:
You can have as much fun with stack illustration as you want. But all three of these examples capture a sense of the journey—for either marketers or customers—in which these martech tools are used. I like Juniper’s and Casey’s because they also break down the different categories of martech products they use and how they map to that customer journey or marketing pipeline.
But you don’t have to follow what they did. Any way you want to represent your stack, we’d love to see it.
That said, every year I like to make a few suggestions for entries that I hope a few people will consider. This year, I would love to see two things:
First, where is genetic AI used in your stack? To create content? Data analysis? Customer service? Improved workflows? Generation of ideas? Are you using specific AI tools or AI features built into larger martech platforms? If you can help us see the real use cases of AI, that would be a great contribution.
Second, I’ve written about martech stack aggregation theory for the past year or so, how some platforms unify data, workflows, user experiences, or governance across your company’s technology stack (ie, they’re not just limited to marketing). The key example of this is a cloud data warehouse or data lake, such as BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake or Databricks, which aggregates data from multiple sources and makes it available to multiple applications for use. I’d love to see some Stackies this year that illustrate real-world examples.
You use a cloud data warehouse as part of your martech stack. Include it!
But you don’t have to limit yourself with any of these ideas. More than anything else, the Stackies are about educating each other about the different ways martech is being applied across industries and geographies. Whatever you want to teach with your stack slide, we’re ready and willing to learn. And we really appreciate the input.
Just make sure to send your slide here by April 26, 2024. Time to stack!
