• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, October 13, 2016

The good news is that since posting an “editor’s note” on Monday inviting nominations for our annual Agency of the Year Awards I received dozens of messages from people interested in doing so. The bad news is most of them were unclear about how to do it. The answer is: any way you want.

Specifically, this is what I responded to them:

We purposely leave the process 100% open-ended, because we believe agencies are the best storytellers in the world and we believe one of the qualifications for “Agency of the Year” is that the should know how to tell their story.

When we started this process years ago, we began with a simple questionnaire and we found a lot of people were simply answering questions. So we stopped doing that.

If you read over the write-ups of any of our past winners -- all available online via the Agency of the Year website at https://www.mediapost.com/agencyoftheyear/ -- you will see how winners have told their stories in the past.

We are looking for examples that "show/don't tell," and make the case why an agency deserves to win based on things it’s done in the past 12 months that demonstrate:

1 - Vision

2 - Innovation

3 - Industry Leadership

Happy to answer any other questions you might have.

Please tell us your story by the end of October.