Grab your favorite slide maker, martech pros. It’s time to show your stack.
The 2023 Stackies: Martech Stack Awards are now accepting entries for the next 11 weeks — until midnight Pacific on Friday, April 21. There is no fee to enter. In fact, for each qualified entry, we — the awards hosts are myself from chiefmartec.com and Frans Riemersma from MartechTribe — will donate $100 to Justdiggit, a non-profit helping to regreen Africa and cool the planet in the process.
So what are The Stackies and why should you enter them?
The Stackies are one the most educational awards programs in marketing. 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 for free so that everyone in marketing can learn from these examples.
We’ve been running The Stackie Awards for eight years now — you can see all of the entries from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 — resulting in a huge collection of hundreds of marketing tech stacks.
Microsoft, Cisco, Philips, Autodesk, Verizon, Whirlpool, Sargento, SAS, United Healthcare, Airstream, and Paychex, are just some of the companies that have generously contributed illustrations of the marketing tech stacks. For example, here’s the one Verizon sent in last year:
But you don’t have to be a famous brand to contribute to the community with a perspective on your own martech stack. Organizations of all sizes, in different industries, and in countries around the world have participated in the Stackies. Every entry helps the whole profession of tech-enabled marketers learn from patterns of other stacks and get new ideas for how to frame and organize their own.
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 for each qualified entry)
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 a hi-res 16:9 JPG, PNG, or GIF image or a 16:9 PDF.
Upload your slide here before midnight PST on Friday, April 21, 2023.
There’s no fee to enter. In fact, for every qualified entry (e.g., a genuine attempt at a real stack slide), we donate $100 to charity, up to a total of $10,000. In past years, we supported Girls Who Code, COOP Careers, and the International Rescue Committee. This year, we’re supporting Justdiggit, a non-profit helping farmers in Africa regreen their land — which also helps to cool the planet.
After collecting all the entries, we will publish a deck of all stacks and host a celebratory online awards ceremony on #MartechDay, Tuesday, May 2. (Stay tuned for more news about a groovy new event we are planning for that day.)
Thank you in advance to those of you who participate and share your stack with the martech community!
