I love The Stackies.
Seriously, this “contest” that invites marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates how they conceptualize their marketing technology stack is fascinating. It’s one of my favorite projects with the martech community.
Forget the over-simplified pictures that you see from vendors, showing idealized marketing stacks as they might exist in Nirvana. The entries into The Stackies are the real deal. They incorporate solutions from multiple vendors. They feature a wide variety of specialized tools. They have pilot programs and platform migrations in flight — marketing stacks are a dynamic work-in-progress. They have overlap in products, but often “rationalized overlap” that uses the right tool for the right job in the right context.
For instance, Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress, and Medium web content tools could be considered redundant at a 50,000-foot view. But in practice, it’s quite common — and actually makes a lot of sense — to use Adobe for a commercial website, WordPress for a blog, and Medium as a content marketing channel.
Similarly, while there’s still a lot of positioning for enterprise marketing suites — i.e., every marketing application you need, all provided by one vendor (colorfully promoted as “a single throat to choke!”, which isn’t exactly the most encouraging of sales pitches) — the reality is that many enterprises use a combination of platforms from multiple major vendors.
For instance, it’s not unusual to see Adobe, Oracle, and Salesforce all in the same stack.
These dynamics are perfectly illustrated by this recent entry to The Stackies from Morningstar, an investment research company offering mutual fund, ETF, and stock analysis, ratings, and data, and portfolio tools.
I really like the flow they’ve captured across different categories, from internal Morningstar analytics to customer-facing digital experiences, and from marketing-led activities to sales enablement and customer relationship management.
I’m so grateful for every company who shares their marketing stack like this. It’s an incredible source of learning for the martech community. But I especially appreciate stacks from firms like Morningstar that aren’t tech companies themselves, as they demonstrate that this is not a “tech” thing. It’s a marketing thing.
Thank you for sharing!
While The Stackies 2018: Marketing Tech Stack Awards are still in progress — in fact, you have until midnight Friday, April 6 to enter your stack — I can’t resist sharing a few like this as we go along.
Of course, if you want to see all of the marketing stacks entered and celebrate the winners, you should join us at the MarTech conference in San Jose, April 23-25. In addition to The Stackies, you’ll have a chance to learn from dozens of real-world educational sessions, to meet nearly 100 innovative marketing technology vendors, and to network with 2,000 of your peers.
Wondering what else we’ll be covering at MarTech? These are 18 questions you will be able to get the answer to…
