It’s that time of year again. The northern hemisphere is looking forward to spring. In the southern hemisphere, we look forward to autumn. And everyone in martech and marketing looks forward to the annual Stackie Awards.
this will be ours 10th Annual The Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Wow, hundreds of martech stack slides of his 10 years: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. Please join us in this martech community tradition this year.
To enter the 2024 Stackie Awards, simply create a single slide (16:9 aspect ratio) that describes your marketing stack (the collection of martech software you use). Slides can be as simple or complex as you like. The best slides successfully convey a clear concept of how the stack is organized and how it fits into your marketing efforts.
Then just Please upload your slides by April 26, 2024. There is no admission fee. On the contrary, we will donate $100 to UNICEF on behalf of all legitimate stacks entered, up to a total of $10,000. We will announce the winners at an online #MartechDay event on May 7, 2024, and publish a deck of all submitted slides.
“So the headline says everyone wins?”
Well, only 5 entries will be selected for the winning stack. That is, the entries that we subjectively believe have contributed the most to the community. But everyone wins, because from our complete collection of stack illustrations you can learn how stacks look and are thought of in different companies. Martech vendors win by being recognized in the stacks they share with their customers. And every donation made to UNICEF on behalf of these entries goes a long way towards something more important than anything else.
Airstream, Autodesk, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Nationwide, Paychex, Philips, Sargento, SAS, United Healthcare, Verizon, Washington Post, Whirlpool are some of the well-known brands sharing their stacks with The Stackies. For example, Juniper Networks’ entry for 2021 is:
Or, as a B2C example, this entry for Casey’s in 2023:
Or, as another example, this is an example from Rabobank in 2022.
You can enjoy stack illustrations as much as you like. But all three examples capture a sense of the process by which marketers or customers use these martech tools. What I like about Juniper and Casey companies is their detailed analysis of the different categories of martech products they use and how they map to the customer’s journey and marketing production line. Because I do.
But you don’t have to follow what they did. However you choose to represent your stack, we’d be happy to see it.
That said, each year I like to make a few suggestions for entries that I hope a few people will consider. Next he would like to look at two things this year.
First, where in the stack is generative AI used? Is it for content creation? Data analysis? customer service? Streamline your workflow? Create ideas? Are you using a specific gen AI tool or are you using gen AI capabilities built into larger martech platforms? It would be great if you could help us see real-world use cases for AI. It will be a contribution.
Second, over the past year or so, I’ve been working on aggregation theory in the martech stack, or how a particular platform can address data, workflow, user experience, or governance across a company’s entire technology stack (i.e., not just marketing). I have written about integration. A classic example of this is a cloud data warehouse or data lake, such as BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, or Databricks, that aggregates data from many sources and makes it available to many apps. This year, I’m hoping to see some Stuckeys that demonstrate this in action.
Are you using a cloud data warehouse as part of your martech stack? Please include it!
But you don’t have to be tied to either idea. Above all, Stackies is about educating each other about the different ways martech is implemented across industries and geographies. Whatever you want to teach with Stacked Slides, we are ready and willing to learn. We deeply appreciate your contribution.
surely Submit your slides here by April 26, 2024. It’s stacking time!