What Stackie winner Airstream learned from communing with its stack

Airstream might just have the most iconic and recognizable campers around. So when it came to visualizing their marketing technology stacks, the company didn’t stray far from the campgrounds.
The company partnered with marketing agency Element Three to develop a slide that ultimately earned them one of five Stackie Awards at MarTech earlier this month through a visualization that demonstrated the many technologies at work in their martech stack, while playing on the theme of nature and escaping to the great outdoors.

But it wasn’t all for the prize. Digital marketing director Dustin Clark said that during the teams’ creative processes and analysis of the stacks, they recognized common goals — and opportunities — across marketing operations teams.

Here are the takeaways they gleaned.

Better data

The persistent need to pull together disparate data remains a pain point for many organizations. “I’m happy to see clients, and others, adopt connectors — systems to move data from one system or another to consolidate sources to get better data,” said Clark. “It’s also nice to see a series of project management software included since the operations side of marketing doesn’t get much love.”

‘Single source of truth’

According to Clark, integrating technologies and creating a reliable source of data continues to challenge marketers. As organizations continue to add technology, it becomes increasingly difficult to create a method for sharing data in a scalable, digestible way. “The biggest opportunity we continue to see is connecting technologies. As communications continue to evolve — ad platforms, chatbots, automation, etc. — the need to work towards one ‘single source of truth’ continues to get trickier, but it’s a fun challenge to solve.”

Analytics are key

“Investing in and setting up analytics is so often overlooked, and yet always pays for itself in the long run, especially in marketing operations. Being able to track and report on the results of marketing efforts quickly is crucial to getting buy-in on projects and budget approvals. You’re not going to get those numbers easily if the state of your web analytics is a mess,” Clark added.

Bring it all together

For digital marketers striving to provide the ‘single source of truth,’ Clark said that integrating data sources properly is crucial to success. “Start with cleaning up your analytics and implementing those technology connectors,” said Clark. “This will help stakeholders see the value of their efforts.”

The Stackie Awards were announced at the MarTech West in San Jose on April 3, 2019. The event also raised $4,800 for Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization supporting women in the field of computer science. This year’s other winners include ESRI, Juniper Networks, Paychex and Sargento.

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

About The Author

Jennifer Cannon

Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media's Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.