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Last call for entries in the 2017 Stackie & Hackie Awards

Microsoft's submission set the bar high, but there will be 5 Stackie Award winners named at MarTech Conference in San Francisco. Submit yours by March 31!

MarTech Today on March 29, 2017 at 1:46 pm

We’ve been getting some terrific entries into this year’s Stackies Awards competition, but the one above came in last week and was particularly exciting to see. The team who runs global marketing IT and operations at Microsoft sent in this complex marketing stack (click to view a larger version).

MarTech Conference chair Scott Brinker shared on his Chief Martec blog why this was such an impressive entry for the martech community to see.

“This is an excellent illustration of a well-designed marketing stack created by Microsoft’s Todd Wells, VP/general manager of marketing IT, and Jeremy Posvar, director of marketing services in Todd’s marketing IT group:

The customer journey — the multi-shaded blue band that leads from pre-sales marketing, to sales, to post-sales marketing, and back around again — rightfully serves as the primary lens for the marketing technology capabilities they’ve developed.
Along that journey, they’ve identified key clusters of marketing competencies and representative technologies they use for each of them: data & analytics, planning & instrumentation, content, events, social, in-product and customer advocacy.
They’ve separated three “tracks” of technology governance — systems of record, systems of differentiation, and systems of innovation — that can be managed according to a pace-layered application strategy (Gartner). This is a great way to balance stability (systems of record) with agility (systems of differentiation and innovation).
It demonstrates how a heterogeneous, best-of-breed marketing stack can be conceptually cohesive — orchestrating a diverse set of technologies in a coherent architecture. Note that multiple major platforms from Adobe, Marketo, Salesforce, Sprinklr and, of course, Microsoft itself, are being used together, each for its relative strengths in context, and they are all augmented by a range of more specialized marketing technology solutions.
The slide itself is beautifully designed. Obviously, that’s not as important as the design of the actual stack itself. But when communicating marketing’s vision for its technology strategy to a wide range of stakeholders, an engaging visual narrative is a powerful tool.”

The Hackie Awards

Alongside the annual Stackie Awards competition, this year the MarTech Conference also launched an essay contest for marketing technologists to share their most important martech “hacks.”

The three most-shared articles will receive Hackie Awards honors, along with one article being recognized as “Editors’ Choice” during the MarTech Conference in San Francisco May 9–11, 2017.

In case you’ve missed any submissions in the 2017 Hackie Awards contest so far, here’s the complete list:

If you don’t have time to write up your own hack, show your support for your colleagues by voting for your favorite martech hack from one of the above articles by sharing the URL on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by May 1, 2017.

Last call for entries

There’s also still time to enter The Stackies & Hackies yourself up until midnight on March 31. How do you think of your marketing stack? We’d love to learn from your perspective, too.

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

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