A Look at the 2016 Stackies Awards: Marketing Stacks on Display
Each year, chiefmartec.com runs its Stackies Awards — a competition where marketing teams submit visual representations of their current marketing technology stacks, illustrating how the various tools and platforms work together. The 2016 edition drew 41 entries from across the industry.
Results were announced at the MarTech 2016 conference in San Francisco. Of the 41 submissions, five entries took home the win. Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com presented each winning team with a trophy and $1,000 to donate to a charity of their choice.
You can read more about the 2016 Stackies Awards winners over at Marketing Land, and the full slideshare of all 41 entries is worth a browse for anyone trying to understand how mature marketing organizations are assembling their tech stacks.
What Made the Entries Interesting
One pattern visible across many of the submitted stacks is the mix of widely adopted third-party platforms alongside purpose-built or heavily customized tools. Some entrants leaned heavily on off-the-shelf solutions; others had developed proprietary components to fill gaps in the commercial market.
Among the more distinctive tools featured in some entries were platforms in the analytics and data management space, including:
Piwik PRO
Piwik PRO offers cloud hosting and enterprise-grade support services built on top of Piwik, the leading open-source web analytics platform. Founded in 2013 to serve organizations that needed enterprise-level reliability and support for Piwik deployments, Piwik PRO extends the core open-source product with web analytics, premium features, and tag manager functionality suited to larger-scale marketing operations.
7suite
7suite is a modular, fully customizable data management stack combining a data management platform (DMP), tag manager, and content personalization engine. Its components can be configured to specific business requirements and deployed either on-premises or in a private cloud — an approach that appeals to organizations prioritizing data ownership and control.
The 2016 Stackies entries as a whole offer a useful snapshot of how marketing technology thinking was evolving at mid-decade — away from monolithic suites and toward deliberately assembled stacks where each layer has a defined role. Even the non-winning entries carry real intelligence about how sophisticated teams were approaching the build-versus-buy decision in analytics, personalization, and data management.