Announcing the Stackie & Hackie Awards for MarTech San Francisco 2017

I’m excited to kick off the third year of The Stackies, which will culminate in an opening awards ceremony at the MarTech Conference in San Francisco, May 9–11, 2017.

Of course, like all agile marketers, we believe in improving with each iteration. So we’ve tweaked and expanded the competition this year.

But first, new readers may be wondering, “What the heck are The Stackies?” They’re a friendly competition where marketers send in a single 16:9 slide that illustrates their marketing stack — the collection of marketing tools and technologies that they use to make marketing magic in a digital world.

We then openly publish all of the entries — check out the 21 marketing stacks from 2015 and the 41 marketing stacks from 2016. We designed The Stackie Awards to be a vehicle for sharing industry insights among peers. By looking at the creative ways so many different marketers conceptualize their stacks, everyone can draw learning and inspiration from them.

The new and improved Stackies & Hackies Awards for 2017

This year, we’re expanding our awards program and making it even better, in three ways:

1. Two ways to participate and win — The Stackies and The Hackies

In addition to The Stackies, single-slide illustrations of marketing stacks, this year we’re also running a new parallel contest for The Hackies. To enter The Hackies, you submit a 600–2,400-word essay that teaches readers an important concept or insight at the intersection of marketing, technology and management. We’ll publish all qualified entries on chiefmartec.com, the MarTech San Francisco event site, and MarTech Today, and the winners will be chosen by the community through “votes” via social shares.

Like The Stackies, the goal of The Hackies is to share knowledge and inspiration with each other.

2. Every entry contributes to charity

Last year, we donated $5,000 to charities — each of the five winners of The Stackies could pick a charity they wanted us to donate $1,000 to in their name. This year, we’ve decided to focus on one charity — Girls Who Code — and make a $100 contribution for every valid entry submitted to The Stackies or The Hackies, up to a grand total of $10,000.

If we hit our goal, we will all get to learn from 100 or more martech stacks and essays! (If any marketing technology vendors would like to pledge “matching” donations — e.g., for every entry in The Stackies that features your product, you’ll also donate $100 to Girls Who Code. We’ll be glad to promote your booster support.)

As a “thank you” for your contribution and support for this cause, everyone who enters The Stackies or The Hackies will also receive a special discount code for the upcoming MarTech Conference in San Francisco.

3.Opening night awards presentation at the MarTech Conference

This year, we’ll really celebrate the contributions to The Stackies and Hackies. The opening night of the MarTech Conference in San Francisco, May 9, will launch with an awards ceremony for the finalists that will include groovy trophies and an open bar. That way, we can properly toast the winners and raise our glasses to everyone who participated.

How to enter and win The Stackie Awards

So what do you need to do to enter The Stackies?

1. Create a single 16:9 slide that visually represents the way you think of your marketing stack. You might illustrate it as a value chain, a technical architecture, a customer journey map, a process flow diagram, a market strategy, a capabilities matrix, or your own original view of how marketing technology is orchestrated in your organization. You can annotate the slide with as much explanatory text as you like, but its strength should be in its visual presentation. Check out last year’s winners for some starting inspiration.
2. Set up your user profile and submit your entry here. You can upload your slide as a high-resolution image, a PDF or a PPTX file any time before midnight Friday, March 31 (Pacific time). You will be granting us permission to publicly share your entry. You may choose to include a paragraph or two that describes the rationale behind the way you organized your stack and any guiding principles that you feel are important in its architecture.

The judging committee, which will consist of editorial staff from chiefmartec.com and MarTech Today, as well as several independent industry experts, will select the five best entries as the winners. Entries will be judged on the following five criteria, in this order of importance:

• Alignment — How well-aligned is your stack with your business?
• Concept — How insightful is the conceptual organization of your stack?
• Clarity — How easy is it for a reader to understand your stack?
• Design — The aesthetics of your slide and its visual appeal
• Detail — More detail is generally better, within reason, for a single slide.

A note about “detail.” We prefer that entries in The Stackies include the specific products that are being used. This isn’t for the sake of endorsing vendors — although I’m sure they will all appreciate it! — but to help us collectively see examples of where specific products fit out in the wild.

However, this is not a requirement. If you don’t wish to disclose a particular vendor, simply put a generic placeholder label for that product in your stack (e.g., “Data Management Platform”). An entry in The Stackies that has anonymous product placeholders can still win. But if you are willing to name names, we’d greatly appreciate it, as it does make these marketing stack visualizations considerably more tangible.

How to enter & win The Hackie Awards

More of a writer than a slide designer? Then consider entering The Hackies:

1. Write a 600–2,400-word essay that teaches a clever marketing technology “hack” — an innovative approach to marketing technology management that readers can adopt to improve their own organizations and digital customer experiences. It can include illustrations, images or screen shots — in fact, we encourage you to have some visual element to your article — as long as you can assign us the rights to freely publish it (so probably no stock photography).
2. Set up your user profile and submit your entry here. You’ll upload your article as a Microsoft Word file any time before midnight Friday, March 31 (Pacific time) — or until we run out of publishing slots (see below). You will be asked to grant us permission to publicly share your entry.

We’ll publish qualified entries on chiefmartec.com, MarTech Today and the MarTech Conference site as they come in, through April 21. The winners will be determined by “people’s choice” through social media. The three articles with the highest number of social media shares by May 1 will each be given an award at the MarTech opening ceremony. In addition, we will also give an additional “editor’s choice” award for the article that we believe makes the greatest contribution to the community.

We will also compile all of those qualified entries into a “Hacking MarTech” e-book that will be freely distributed as a resource for the community at large.

A “qualified entry” must be well-written and on-topic within the realm of marketing, technology and management — which is still a vast subject area but luckily excludes political op-ed polemics. It must teach the reader something meaningful. And, most importantly, it must not be a thinly-veiled (or outright naked) sales pitch for a particular vendor’s product or service. Our editorial staff reserves the right to determine whether an article qualifies.

If you’re already thinking about how to hack The Hackies, you will realize that articles that are published earlier are more likely to collect more social media shares by May 1. And, since we will publish no more than one entry per day, in the order in which they are submitted, late entries may run out of slots in which to be published. So get crackin’, er, hackin’.

Ready to share your insights and experience with your peers? Contribute to learning across the martech community? Help raise money for a terrific charity? And perhaps even bask in the glory of receiving an award for your contribution at MarTech Conference, in San Francisco?

Then please participate in The Stackies and The Hackies. We’re really looking forward to learning from your perspective and insight!

Click here to set up your profile and submit your entries.

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 president and CTO of ion interactive, a leading provider of landing page management and conversion optimization software. Scott 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. He also writes a blog on marketing technology, Chief Marketing Technologist. Follow him on twitter via @chiefmartec.