As much as I love the actual Markie Awards night, it’s the days leading up to the deadline are some of the best of the year. Many of our Customer Success Managers, services consultants, partners and Sales teams have been reviewing submissions to help customers put their best foot forward.
The customers themselves have spent days, weeks and long hours to pull together their stories, numbers and testimonials to compete against the best marketers in the industry. Why would they put in so much effort at the risk of disrupting their business and normal business review cycles?
I offer three reasons why below:
1. Make History and Be Part of Something SpecialNow in its 11th year, the Markies have evolved to celebrate excellence in data-driven modern marketing. The first awards were held in San Francisco in 2007 at the W Hotel and focused solely on the adoption of Marketing Automation (Oracle Eloqua). Now they have expanded to celebrate excellence across Oracle and our pillar offerings globally.
As we welcomed newly acquired customers into the family, we openly added categories to celebrate their achievements. We first celebrated winners and finalists in the years noted below: Oracle Responsys (2014), Oracle Social (2014), Oracle Content Marketing (2014), Oracle BlueKai (2015), Oracle DataLogix (2016), Oracle Maxymiser (2016). Winners also go home with a statue designed by the same creator of The Emmy Awards.
In the clip below, Ville from idBBN highlights why his global agency believes that this is the most important marketing competition of the year.
2. Promote How You Deliver Great Customer ExperiencesThe Markies present a unique opportunity for our customers, partners and employees to share in the recognition for creating superior customer experiences with technology. I still talk about about how Cetera combined two AppCloud technologies – Vidyard and LookbookHQ to capture the hearts and minds of Financial Advisors.
Last year more than ever our customers shared how much their account teams contributed to their achievements ranging from their Customer Success Manager, Adoption Advisor, their Services Consultants, partners and in some cases the initial sales team who helped them select Oracle.
For VP of Marketing at Mobovida Ed Choi, the Markies not only gave them a platform to share their usage of Oracle Responsys, but they attracted new talent to their marketing team because of the awards long history.
In the next clip, Omar from Juniper Networks shares how their Markie win impacted his team’s growth, their relationship with sales (it improved!) and what’s next for their customers as they combine testing and programmatic advertising with marketing automation.
3. Personal Branding and the Art of StorytellingSuccess comes from self-packaging and the Markies provides the perfect launch pad for customers to relish in their accomplishment not just with technologies but with transforming their business. This is true for our past leaders of the year: Blake Cahill led Royal Phillips to engage 1.7M new buyers through digital techniques; and my longtime friend Rhonda Wunderlin and her team at Penton undertook a massive project to migrate 82 brands into 1 marketing automation system in 1 year at scale.
Both have gone on to win multiple awards following the Markies and are sought after for their stories and their leadership in digital marketing.
When I analyzed the behaviors of Markie-winning customers over the past two years, there was a common thread among them: the Markie Award was not their first opportunity to share their story. Whether they spoke at a user group, Modern Marketing Mashup, our modern experiences or industry events – a prior experience sharing their story strongly correlated with a win.
The program history, promoting how your company is changing the world through technology and perfecting the art of story-telling are among the reasons that our customers, partners and employees continue to invest in the program so heavily. I have Joe Payne, Steve Gershik, Heather Foeh, Ann Davis and Kirsten Foon for having touched the program through the years.
Best of luck to this year’s entrants and I will see you at the Markie Awards on April 25th where we will celebrate Marketing Excellence at Modern Customer Experience.
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