Enter The Stackie Awards 2020: Share your marketing stack with the martech community

If there’s one marketing awards program where the entire industry wins, it’s The Stackies. Each year, dozens of organizations enter a 16×9 slide that visualizes their “marketing stack” — the collection of martech software they use — and how they think about its structure. We then publish them all, ungated, for everyone in marketing to learn from these examples.

Over the years, this has resulted in a collection of hundreds of marketing stacks — see stacks from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 — that have helped tens of thousands of marketers better understand marketing technology systems.

In addition to helping the marketing community, participants in The Stackies:

• Discover the scope and structure of their marketing stack
• Create a great slide to explain their stack to stakeholders
• Reward their martech vendors with recognition in their stack
• Attract marketing talent to work with their stack
• Promote their brand across the marketing industry
• Raise money for charity (we donate $100 to Girls Who Code for each stack)

Now, here’s your opportunity to join in The Stackies to launch the next decade…

The Stackies 2020: Marketing Stack Awards are open for entries.

To participate, create a 16:9 slide that illustrates the way you conceptualize your marketing stack — the different tools you use, but more importantly, how you think about the way they fit together.

It doesn’t have to be a fancy work of art (even though some entries are). Simply sharing the composition and basic organization of your stack is an immensely valuable contribution to the community. We all learn from the collective patterns that emerge.

You can create your slide in PowerPoint, Google Slides, or any other program. Just export the final slide as a 1600×900 pixel JPG, PNG, or GIF image or a 16:9 PDF.

Upload your slide here before midnight PST on Friday, March 20, 2020.

There’s no cost to enter. In fact, for every qualified entry (e.g., a meaningful stack slide), we will donate $100 to Girls Who Code, up to a total of $10,000.

We’ll publish the deck of all stacks and host a celebratory awards ceremony at the opening reception of the MarTech conference in San Jose on April 15. Five entries that our judges deem as particularly “outstanding” will be awarded trophies.

But again, just by entering, you help everyone in marketing win.

Bonus opportunity for early submissions

These stack slides are such a great way for marketers to learn-by-example about different martech implementations in the real world. We’d love to shine a light on more of them.

If you enter your Stackie early — in December, January, or February — we will select the most interesting ones we receive in advance each month and feature them in their own article. If you’re open to it, we’ll interview you about the story behind your stack.

Your experience, insights, and perspective will be greatly appreciated by your peers.

Ideas for the design of your stack slide

One of the most fascinating aspects of The Stackies is seeing the different lenses that people bring to visualizing their marketing stack.

One of the most important martech lessons I’ve learned is that there’s not just one way to look at a marketing stack. It’s useful to analyze your stack along several different dimensions to better understand the interplay between the technology, the processes in your organization, the teams who interact with them, and the impact on customer experience.

If you’re looking for ideas for how to illustrate your stack, a great place to start is by looking at examples from previous entries to The Stackies. People have organized their stack slides in many different ways:

• By the flow of work across teams
• By stages along the customer journey
• By jobs-to-be-done within marketing and related departments
• By a “pace layering” architecture (e.g., Microsoft’s stack)
• By the evolution of your stack over time
• By categories of products used from the marketing technology landscape

…and many more.

However, if you’re looking to pioneer new stack visualizations though, I’d love to see entries — wink, wink, I’d be very interested in featuring such entries in a story — that mapped a stack into one of these concepts:

• The 6 C’s Model
• The 4 Forces Model (from The New Rules of Marketing Technology & Operations)
• The 4 Layers of Integration, illustrating the ecosystems in your stack
• The 8 P’s of Self-Service Martech (i.e., a “platform” view of your stack)
• By degree of collaboration between marketing and IT
• By stages within the martech maturity model

I can’t wait to see what you create.

A gigantic, heartfelt thank you in advance to you if you do decide to participate. I’m so grateful for everyone who contributes to this project. And I assure you, tens of thousands of your peers are too.

When you’re ready, click the form below to send in your entry:

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Scott Brinker

Scott Brinker is the conference chair of the MarTech® Conference, a vendor-agnostic marketing technology conference and trade show series produced by MarTech Today's parent company, Third Door Media. The MarTech event grew out of Brinker's blog, chiefmartec.com, which has chronicled the rise of marketing technology and its changing marketing strategy, management and culture since 2008. In addition to his work on MarTech, Scott serves as the VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive.