2019 Stackie Awards: Meet the winners and behold their first-class marketing technology stacks

The 2019 Stackie Awards kicked off this year’s MarTech Conference, an event that brought together the marketing technology community to honor its brightest stars. With nearly 50 entries submitted, five winners were announced by the conference’s Program Chair Scott Brinker.

“I’m incredibly grateful to all of the companies who participate in The Stackies. It gives the community a wealth of great examples of real-world marketing stacks,” said Brinker, “It’s not just learning about which tools people are using for different capabilities — although that’s certainly helpful. It’s about understanding the way different marketing teams conceptualize their stacks.”

This year’s Stackie Awards event was sponsored by tech stack management tool Airstack, with $4,800 of the proceeds raised from entry fees donated to Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization that supports women in the field of computer science. The 2019 Stackie award winners included:

• Paychex
• Airstream
• Sargento Foods
• Juniper Networks
• ESRI

To submit an entry, marketing technology teams had to create a single slide deck illustrating their marketing stack and how they conceptualize it. Brinker said entries included a variety of illustrations, with some companies mapping their martech stacks to the customer journey and others highlighting marketing technology workflows.

“We collectively learn so much from the way people organize and visualize their stacks,” said Brinker, “The Stackies are an awards program where the whole martech community is a winner.”

Paychex

Paychex marketing technology manager Stacy Falkman said her team had set specific marketing technology objectives during the past two years, from starting to inventory, organize and manage the company’s martech stack, to pulling intelligence from the tools they had implemented.

“Submitting the stack was a milestone of those efforts, but winning now that was a bonus that helped us truly feel confident in those efforts and progress,” said Falkman.

She says the biggest insight in building the slide was the general awareness gained around Paychex’s marketing technology and the number of systems it employs to support foundational platforms.

Airstream

Element Three, Airstream’s digital marketing partner, worked with the brand to create Airstream’s slide for this year’s competition.

“Over the years, Element Three has helped us integrate and adopt new marketing technology that is helping to take our business, brand, and customer experience to the next level,” said Adam Grillot, Airstream’s customer experience marketing manager, “Winning a Stackie is just another example of how our partnership has pushed the envelope in all areas of marketing, and marketing technology is a huge key when it comes to delivering an exceptional Airstream brand experience for our community.”

Sargento

Cami Schenck, the senior marketing manager of media and digital for Sargento Foods said it was very helpful to go through the process of creating the slide to make sure the team was thinking about its martech stack in the broadest sense to educate all stakeholders, both internally and externally.

“Our goal was to share at a high level the tools and technologies used at each phase of the digital marketing process, from audience strategy to content development to executing the plan and finally measurement,” said Schenck, “We use the martech illustration to educate key stakeholders across our organization, which have a varying level of digital knowledge.”

Juniper Networks

When creating their winning martech slide, Juniper Networks senior marketing director Nancy Weintraub said the goal was to illustrate the simplicity and fluidity of the company’s martech stack in support of the customers’ journey.

“The cloud graphic is a tribute to our advancements in cloud networking as well as clearly depicting the various technologies that play a part in each stage of the buyer’s journey,” said Weintraub, “As we built the slide, we became mindful of our core systems, but also discovered new areas where we can be bold, take risks and try new things.”

ESRI

ESRI’s manager of marketing technology Steve Schultz and marketing technologist Robert Yokum said they have often referenced previous Stackie winners for new ideas and concepts to show what an integrated martech stack can achieve.

“Over the last three to four years, we’ve put a lot of work into modernizing our marketing department across process, skills training, and improving the technology available to marketers,” said the two, “We reached a point where we felt it was time to submit our own work to show what we’ve done.”

They said building the slide forced them to think even more about ESRI’s martech stack, and the areas it impacts, in order to communicate the overall process so that users could understand and digest it quickly.

“As a software company that helps put data on maps, using an approach that leveraged geography made sense to us. This helped us to describe the actions to provide easy context for each piece of the stack and the business process.”

---