Stackie Award winner ESRI’s martech slide ‘spread like wildfire’ across the company

It’s one thing to be recognized by the marketing technology industry, it’s quite another when your efforts as a marketing technologist are finally understood by the rest of your company. This is what happened when Robert Yocum announced to the rest of the ESRI team that the slide he put together with ESRI’s head of marketing Steve Schultz and their designer Daniel Gill had won a Stackie.

“We announced the win internally and from there, the news and diagram spread like wildfire across the company,” said Yocum, “It’s been exciting to see so many people get excited about this and learn from it. Several employees have told me in passing that they have a much better idea of what we’ve built after seeing the diagram, so that has been a win for us internally for sure.”

Merging technological viewpoints with the creative process

It took Yocum, Schultz and Gill about three months of looking at different concepts, before deciding on the final creative.

“Merging a technological viewpoint with the creative process wasn’t always easy. For my part, listing out the technologies we needed to include and their usage was relatively easy, but then helping Daniel understand that overall process and how the technology fits was somewhat similar to onboarding a new employee in many regards,” said Yocum, “Our creative team benefits from the technology, but doesn’t interact with large portions of it on a daily basis, so there was a lot of new information for him.”

Yocum said the final two weeks of the creation process was when the bulk of work took place, with several iterations of the slide that were factually accurate, but not descriptive or educational. It was Schultz who came up with the fishing trip theme to describe ESRI’s martech process. Determining the creative concept led quickly to the final version that was submitted.

When asked if the team will keep the slide updated, Yocum said absolutely.

“As we implement more tools or reconceive how we approach the process, we’ll keep this up to date or create a new diagram if needed,” said Yocum, “We feel the core stack is in place and maturing nicely with our marketers. That will evolve as updates are made, but additional tools for predictive modeling or monitoring will likely start to come online in the future to expand our capability set.”