Summer approaches! (Well, at least in the Northern hemisphere.) Fresh air, sunshine, and frolicking outdoors have never felt so viscerally appealing, after a seemingly infinite year indoors. I hope you get time to walk in the woods, roll in the grass, or dip your feet in the ocean.
But there’s still work to be done! Marketing and martech continue to advance, adapting to the “new normal” of innovative digital customer experiences and digital business operations. We’ll educate and celebrate this at the next (virtual) MarTech Conference at the end of summer, September 14-15. And a big part of the celebrations will be The 2021 MarTech Stackie Awards.
Yes, this year’s Stackie Awards are now officially open for entries.
The Stackies are arguably the most educational awards program 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, ungated, for everyone in marketing to learn from these examples.
Over six years, this has generated a collection of hundreds of marketing stacks — see stacks from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 — that have helped tens of thousands of marketers better understand marketing technology systems.
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 to COOP Careers for each stack)
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 1600×900 pixel JPG, PNG, or GIF image or a 16:9 PDF.
Upload your slide here before midnight PST on Friday, September 3, 2021.
There’s no cost to enter. In fact, for every qualified entry (e.g., a meaningful stack slide), we will donate $100 to COOP Careers, up to total of $10,000.
We’ll publish the deck of all stacks and host a celebratory awards ceremony at the virtual MarTech conference on September 14-15. Five entries that our judges deem as particularly “outstanding” will be awarded trophies.
But just by entering, you help everyone in marketing win.
Bonus Opportunity for Early Submissions
These stack slides are a such a great way for marketers to learn-by-example about different martech implementations in the real world. We’d love to shine a light on more of them.
If you enter your Stackie early — in May, June, or July — we will select the most interesting ones we receive in advance each month and feature them in their own article. If you’re open to it, we’ll interview you about the story behind your stack.
It will be the Summer of Stacks!
Your experience, insights, and perspective will be greatly appreciated by your peers.
Ideas for the Design of Your Stack Slide
One of the most fascinating aspects of The Stackies is seeing the different lenses that people bring to visualizing their marketing stack. There’s not just one way to look at a stack. It’s useful to analyze your stack along several different dimensions, to better understand the interplay between technology, process, and teams — and their impact on customer experience.
If you’re looking for ideas for how to illustrate your stack, a great place to start is by looking at examples from previous entries to The Stackies. People have organized their stack slides in many different ways:
- By the flow of work across teams
- By stages along the customer journey
- By jobs-to-be-done within marketing and related departments
- By a “pace layering” architecture (e.g., Microsoft’s stack)
- By evolution of your stack over time
- By categories of products used from the marketing technology landscape
…and many more. Or pioneer a new stack visualization that you invent! We can’t wait to see what you create.
A gigantic, heartfelt thank you in advance to you if you decide to participate. We’re so grateful for everyone who contributes to this project. And I assure you, tens of thousands of your peers are too.
When you’re ready, click the form below to send in your entry:
