The second annual Stackies awards are coming up! What does your Marketo Stack look like?
How do you visualize your marketing technology stacks?
- Share an illustration of your stack with your marketing peers!
- Winners will be celebrated on stage at MarTech in San Francisco, March 21-22. (You don’t have to be present to win, but it would be fun.)
- The conference will donate $5,000 to charity — each of the top five winners will have the opportunity to nominate a charity of their preference to receive a $1,000 donation.
- There will even be groovy trophy statues (much cooler than Golden Globes).
The real point of the Stackies is to share your ideas with the marketing technology community and to learn from others. Marketing technology stacks — the collection of marketing technology products that your company uses and how they’re conceptually organized — are an important part of modern marketing management. We can learn a lot by seeing how our peers conceive of their stacks and the pieces that they assemble together. All entries into the Stackies will be publicly shared in a SlideShare deck at the end of the contest — so everyone in the community benefits from the effort invested in these, and everyone who enters gets recognized for their contribution.
Rules and guidelines for the 2016 Stackies
So what do you need to do to enter the Stackies? These 4 steps (follow carefully):
- 1. Create a single 16×9 slide that visually organizes your marketing technology stack however you think best represents the way you think of it.
- 2. Send an email to sbrinker@chiefmartec.com with the subject line “Stackies entry” with your slide attached as an image, a PDF, or a PPTX file any time before midnight Friday, March 11 (Pacific time).
- 3. Include in your email the sentence, “I give you permission to publicly share my entry in the Stackies.”
- 4. Optionally include in your email a paragraph or two that describes the rationale behind the way you’ve organized your stack and any guiding principles that you feel are important in its architecture.
The judging committee will select the five best entries as the winners. Entries will be judged on the following five criteria, in this order of importance:
- Alignment — how well-aligned is your stack with your business
- Concept — how effective is the conceptual organization of your stack
- Clarity — how easy is it for a reader to understand your stack
- Design — the aesthetics of your slide and its visual appeal
- Detail — more detail is generally better, within reason for a single slide
A note about “detail.” We prefer that entries in the Stackies include the specific products that are being used. This isn’t for endorsing any particular vendor, but to help us collectively see examples of where specific products fit out in the wild.
However, this is not a requirement. If you don’t wish to disclose a particular vendor, simply put a generic placeholder label for that product in your stack (e.g., “Data Management Platform”). A Stackie entry that has anonymous product placeholders can still win. But if you are willing to name names, we’d greatly appreciate it, as it does make these stack visualizations considerably more tangible.
Other things to think about as you present your stack:
- What was the organizing concept of this stack?
- Can you share a bit about the visual design of this stack?
- What about the interplay between marketing and sales shown in this stack?
- Any guiding principles you’d share about how ion adopts marketing technology?
P.S. There’s not much fine print to the Stackies, but to be safe, I’ll add this: I reserve the right to disqualify slides that are offensive (sorry, no nude pictures in your stack — that’s thinking too far out of the box) or trivial (if you use just a single marketing tech product, I’m happy for you, but there’s no value to the community in sharing that stack-of-one) or for some other yet-to-be-determined reason seems inappropriate or outside the spirit of this exercise
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