We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – we love The Stackie Awards!! This is the annual round-up led by Scott Brinker, editor of chiefmartec.com and Hubspot’s VP of Platform Ecosystem, that invites marketers to showcase their martech stacks in a single-slide diagram, with full reign to organize and visualize them any way they like. 

The results are always eye-opening and this year’s entries were no exception. A total of 36 entries were released on May 2nd on “#MarTechDay” at the newly-minted Best of Breed Marketing Summit, hosted by Brinker and fellow martech influencer and founder of Martech Tribe, Frans Riemersma. Participants included a wide range of businesses, including B2B powerhouses like IBM, Verizon Business, and Akamai, and companies that support them like 6sense, Integrate, and Merkle. 
 

Some participants had some fun with the assignment too, with Esri creating a map styled after a city transit map…  

 
and SAS Institute using a drive into an apple orchard as an analogy for their stack (and customer journey).

Of course, it’s interesting and fun to see these creative designs, but it also shows quite clearly just how complex and varied the martech landscape has become.  

Just to crystallize that point, here are 3 stark callouts based on our review of the these insightful infographics: 

1) The entrants listed an average of 35 tools on their martech stacks!! (yes, we counted all of the logos ). That’s a lot to vet, setup, manage, maintain, and measure seamlessly and accurately. 

2) It bears repeating how incredibly unique each tech stack is. With more than 11,000 technologies to choose from (see chiefmartec’s updated database of tools here, more on that another time), maybe that’s not surprising, but it’s quite striking when companies show the cocktail of tools they’ve chosen to deploy. Clearly companies are continuing to choose their best-of-breed favorites for each task, rather than converging onto a single set of tools or a monolithic platform. 

3) Not only do these selections of tools vary from company to company, but even the ways the tools are categorized vary. For example, Akamai uses four broad categories: Digital Experience, Social & Events, Demand Generation, and Data & Analytics; while IBM groups its tools into Planning & Operations, AdTech, Data, Automation & Audience, Digital, Content, Event, and Sales. So there’s no standard set of tools to use and there’s no set way to organize them either!

The flexibility and diversity of these stacks is wonderful, but that also creates a ton of complexity and difficulty for B2B executives to manage, analyze, optimize, and draw insights.

• Which tactics and tools are running right this minute?
• Which content and vendors are performing best? 
• If we had to cut a dollar, where should we cut it to minimize impact? 
• How does our performance compare to industry peers? 
• The quarterly Board Meeting is coming up, what are my top takeaways to share?
• What are my peers doing that I should be considering?

Marketing teams are under increasing pressure to answer questions like these and so much more. It’s nearly impossible to have time to manage an unwieldy stack AND stay sharp on all of these questions. 

And that’s exactly the reason why we created Octane11 – to make it easy for business leaders to design and build their preferred stack of partners AND still have the ability to easily extract insights across the board AND be able to compare their results to industry benchmarks without requiring an army of data engineers and data scientists.  

Octane11 delivers on this vision with an easy-to-set-up and easy-to-use analytics platform that is tailored to B2B needs, so marketing teams can make smarter decisions without getting bogged down in the minutiae of data management.  

Whether your B2B martech stack includes 10 ingredients or 36 ingredients like the Stackies entrants this year, we’re here to help you get a handle on all of your paid, owned, and earned activities, enable you to draw instant insights, and help you compare your results to industry trends. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Octane11 can help you get a handle on your complex martech stack, schedule a 1:1 session at www.octane11.com/book-a-demo/ today!