Yesterday we celebrated the 10th annual Stackie Awards as part of #MartechDay. Every year for the past decade, we’ve invited marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates their marketing tech stack and how they conceptualize it. From these entries, we select five “winners” whose visualizations we thought were particularly noteworthy in some way.
I put “winners” in quotes because, as we always acknowledge, the real determination of a winning stack is if it delivers value to your business. But it’s still fun to celebrate with a few awards for some remarkable illustrations. Truthfully, everyone who enters The Stackies deserves recognition for contributing their stack visualization to the community. We openly share all the entries, so we all benefit from seeing how different companies construct their martech stacks.
You can download the complete deck of all 26 this year’s Stackie entries here.
And there are hundreds more from previous years here: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
There has never been a fee to participate in The Stackies. Instead, we pick a charity every year and make a $100 donation on behalf of every qualifying stack entry we receive. This year we’re donating $2,600 (26 x $100) to UNICEF. In total, this will make $38,500 donated from The Stackies to worthy causes.
2024 Stackie Lifetime Achievement Awards
There are some companies that have entered The Stackies many times over the years. We’re especially grateful for these repeat contributors because they show how stacks evolve over time.
So before we share the five new winners this year, we want to introduce you to the six inaugural Stackie Lifetime Achievement Award winners. To be eligible for one of these awards, a company must (1) enter a stack in the current year, (2) have entered a stack in at least 3 previous years, and (3) needs to have won in at least one of those years.
Esri (4 Martech Stacks)
Here’s Esri’s 2024 Stackie illustration. Esri has always done a wonderful job of illustrating their stacks. We particularly like the ecosystem theme that they’ve chosen a couple of times. After all, your stack is a kind of internal technology ecosystem. One of the things that we appreciate about their slides is that for each product identified in their stack, they include a short little blurb about what that product does.
Itaú (4 Martech Stacks)
Here’s Itaú’s 2024 Stackie illustration. Without naming names — Itaú’s Stackie entries have never identified the specific martech vendors they use — Itaú always does a marvelous job of illustrating the network of capabilities in their stack. Their visualizations often remind me of system dynamics maps, which is apropos to real-world marketing operations.
Philips Digital Marketing (5 Martech Stacks)
Here’s Philips Digital Marketing & E-Commerce’s 2024 Stackie illustration. This team at Philips has won multiple times, and by studying their slides, you can certainly see why. First, they’re visually stunning. But more importantly, every year they find a way to present new insights into the structure of their martech stack and how they think about it. For example, this year, we love how they show the different layers of their stack — data, content, customer engagement, commerce, and experience — and the tools associated with each.
Sargento (6 Martech Stacks)
Here’s Sargento’s 2024 Stackie illustration. Without a doubt, Sargento is our reigning champion. They’ve sent in six remarkable visualizations of their martech stack over the years. Each one has shared a narrative about how they conceptualize their stack, but also how they see it aligned with their multi-channel, go-to-market strategy. Bravo, Sargento. Bravo.
SAS (5 Martech Stacks)
Here’s SAS’s 2024 Stackie illustration. With five terrific entries over the years, SAS is another hero of our martech community. While they’re one of the leading martech platforms in the world, we’ve always appreciated how they show the way their own products intersect with a wider field of other martech products in their own marketing operations. This year’s Stackie is actually the third in a series — growing, harvesting, delivering — which can be appreciated back-to-back. Nicely done, SAS!
Verizon (4 Martech Stacks)
Here’s Verizon’s 2024 Stackie illustration. We have always appreciate the clean design of Verizon’s Stackie entries. They make it very easy to see the key capabilities of their stack and the “flow” of their marketing operations for the customer journey. A great Stackie — for that matter, a great stack — doesn’t need to be complicated. Verizon’s slide this year puts more emphasis on explaining the intent and rationale of their stack.
Congratulations to all of our Stackie Lifetime Achievement Award winners. We hope you’ll be back next year to hold on to your title — and that you will be joined by others!
2024 Stackie Award Winners
Now we’re excited to present the five Stackies we chose as individual winners this year. We confess, these were especially hard choices to make this year, given how compelling so many of the entries were.
ChurnZero Martech Stack
ChurnZero went with a fun musical themed hieraracy of genres, playlists, and artists — categories, capabilities, and specific martech products they use for each. They color-coded tools by the frequency in which thy’re using, from least to most. (One of our ongoing commentaries on this blog is that not every tool needs to be used all the time to still have value in your martech stack.) They noted that 80% of the products in their stack use AI, including, of course, ChurnZero.
Demandbase Martech Stack
Demandbase has been one of the pioneers of the ABM movement. We thought their integrated circuit board motif was a cool representation of an integrated — get it? — martech stack. Products in their stack are organized around four main stages of the customer journey: target/discover, inquire/consideration, engage/convert, and grow/retain. They also identified which tools they saw as notably AI-enabled technology (including many of the modules of the Demandbase platform itself).
Sage Martech Stack
Sage did an excellent job of juxtaposing two different dimensions of their martech stack. The first dimension is the customer journey, framed in the language of the customer: I’m aware, I consider, I buy, I set up, I adopt and use, I’m supported, I flex, and I stay. The second dimension organizes products by marketing operations capabilities: advocacy, campaign & lead management, community & social, compliance, content management, event management, marketing data & analytics, marketing management, and optimization. Specific products are identified by their icons. The way these two dimensions are interwoven is impressive and instructional.
StackMoxie Martech Stack
We loved StackMoxie’s illustration for a few reason. First, it clearly illustrates the complete journey of the customer and the martech products that journey flows through at each stage. Second, it shows how that journey spans multiple departments — it’s a team sport, not just a marketing contest. And third, it’s just really easy to understand. Enlightenment is better than complexity.
Thomson Reuters Martech Stack
Finally, we chose this stack illustration from Thomson Reuters. They had us at the start in the primoridal “spreadsheet forest” — let’s admit it, that’s where so many martech capabilities began. They then take us on a trek through all six top-level categories of the martech landscape and the specific products they use within each of them. The ultimate destination? An AI future. The narrative at the bottom of the slide describes their vision of evolving martech capabilities, from yesterday, to today, to tomorrow.
Again, you can download the complete deck of all 2024 Stackie slides.
A huge thank you to everyone who entered The 2024 Stackie Awards. We deeply appreciate your willingness to share your stack visualizations with the martech community.
We also want to express our deep gratitude to the 5 sponsors for #MartechDay 2024, who helped cover our expenses for maintaining the martech landscape and spending months on the research and analysis around it: GrowthLoop, MoEngage, SAS, Syncari, and WordPress VIP.
If you haven’t yet picked up a copy of 101-page The State of Martech 2024 Report we released yesterday, you can register for a free copy to be emailed to you here.
