It’s 2025, and martech stacks are going through all kinds of changes.
From unified data to agentic workflows, from consolidating vendors to proliferating gen AI, and from commercially-packaged platforms to custom-developed apps, martech stacks — and the marketing ops heroes who manage them — are experiencing a Renaissance of new ideas and new technologies.
The 2025 Stackie Awards are your opportunity to contribute to that Renaissance.
“What are the Stackie Awards?” you say.
They’re a fun awards contest we’ve been running since 2015, where marketing teams send in a single slide that illustrates their martech stack and how they think about it.
You can see all 300+ entries from the past 10 years: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. ABInBev, Airstream, Autodesk, Blackrock, Cisco, Microsoft, Nationwide, Paychex, Philips, Sargento, SAS, Verizon, Washington Post, and Whirlpool are just a few of the companies who have entered over the years.
“Why would they do that?” you ask.
Great question! There’s a bounty of good reasons to participate:
- The process of visualizing your stack is often a learning experience
- Earn karma for sharing stack ideas and examples with the martech community
- Let your martech/marketing ops team publicly celebrate their craft
- Reward martech vendors in your stack that you use and like by including them
- Promote your brand to 1,000’s of marketers who will reference these slides
- There’s no fee to enter — we do these awards for community learning, not profit
- Instead, we donate $100 to UNICEF for every legit entry, up to a total of $10,000
All of the entries will be shared, ungated, with the full martech community on #MartechDay, May 6. So you’ll definitely get public recognition — and gratitude! — for your contribution.
But we’ll also select five winners for Best Stackie Awards that will be presented in a grand online #MartechDay ceremony. (We also bestow Stackie Lifetime Acheivement Awards to those companies who have submitted great entries for three or more years.)
How to Enter the 2025 Stackie Awards
- Brainstorm a fun, educational, and/or insightful way to visualize your stack.
- Illustrate it on a single 16:9-sized slide.
- Export your slide as a PDF (preferred) or high-res image (3,200×1,800px).
- Submit it at surveymonkey.com/r/Stackies2025 by midnight April 4, 2025.
- Join us for the #MartechDay online awards ceremony on May 6, 2025.
That’s it! Again, there’s no fee to enter.
“So how do you win?” you wonder, savoring the idea of a coveted Best Stackie Award.
Well, first, we always emphasize this point: any stack that efficiently delivers value to your business is a winning stack where it really counts. And any team that is willing to send in a visualization of their stack, to generously contribute to the learning of others in the martech community, is a hero in our book.
Still, winning an actual Stackie Award is a fun feather to put in your cap.
We choose the winners based on a variety of factors:
- How comprehensive of a view of the stack is it?
- Does it name specific products? (Not required, but nice.)
- Does it show how the pieces of the stack relate to each other?
- Does it provide additional information about each piece, such as frequency of use, relative cost, its length of tenure, if it has AI features, or degree of customization?
- Does it align the stack against a process map or customer jouney map?
- Does it show who uses different tools in the stack and identify their use cases?
- Does it chart the evolution of the stack over time?
- Does it demonstrate a conceptual framework that others can learn from?
- Is it visually appealing? (Comprehensablity is more important than aethestics.)
- And this year — of course — does it show how you’re incorporating AI into your stack?
Do you need to fulfill all of these criteria to win? Not at all! If your stack knocks it out of the park with even two or three of these, it can make it to the winner’s circle. It doesn’t have to be complex. Simple stacks are good. (If you have a more complex stack, and can show in a simplified way how you organize it cohesively, that’s pretty impressive too.)
But above all, have fun with this. It’s a chance to learn about your stack and others’. And you can take this occasion to make your stack look sexy! (Because, let’s face it, “sexy” is not an adjective normally associated with martech stacks.)
So come join us this year and enter the 2025 Stackies Awards.
Just be sure to do it before midnight on Friday, April 4. You’ll be glad you did. Good luck!
