Four years ago, 360i's management team set out to reinvent the agency model as we know it. The next year, it was named OMMA's digital agency of the year. The year after that, it repeated the feat. This year, it earns a threepeat, in part, for reinventing it once again. In fact, it published a "playbook" to do exactly that. The book, which was distributed to current and prospective clients, the media and other influential stakeholders is entitled "Reimagine (Almost) Everything."

For decades marketers and agencies have tried to react quickly to consumer trends and keep track of changing perceptions of brands. In the increasingly connected digital world of the past few years the urgency to do so has exponentially increased.

Agency of the Year profiles don't normally begin with a disclaimer, but MediaPost's awards aren't like those of other trade publications, so this profile begins by addressing the multibillion dollar elephant in the room - the agency's loss of a Procter & Gamble's nearly $3 billion U.S. media services account.

Giant Spoon was invited to visit with STX Entertainment when the fledging studio was looking for a traditional media planning and buying agency. What it got was something much, much more, and the client wasted no time putting the boutique's extraordinary inventiveness to work.

Sheriff Sorrell. It's got a nice ring to it. Not as classy, perhaps, as Sir Martin, but in 2015, under the leadership of its outspoken and iconoclastic founder and CEO, WPP strode across the media ecosystem, determined to use its clout to create a more competitive and transparent marketplace.

WPP CEO Martin Sorrell is the fifth best CEO in the world according to the Harvard Business Review. That ranking is based predominantly on a series of financial metrics that WPP has aced over the last 20 years or so with Sorrell at the helm.

In the new media world of documenting, sharing, collecting likes and faves and living publicly, the enabler of content may very well be king. Already perceived as the top brand providing thrilling first-person content, GoPro may very well be the one to be crowned, if 2015 has anything to say about it.

At a time when the programmatic media marketplace seems plagued by issues of trust and transparency, WPP's Xaxis unit has carved out a dominant market position by investing in the best people, technology, data and inventory -- yes, that's right, inventory -- in the business. Unlike most agency-owned trading desks, buying groups or otherwise-named programmatic platforms, Xaxis makes no bones about it: It's sole purpose is to acquire the best inventory in the marketplace for one reason -- to resell it and make big profits by doing so. Unlike any other agency-owned programmatic media operation, Xaxis considers itself a medium …

At first thought, U.S. International Media might seem like an odd choice for MediaPost's first-ever Programmatic Media Agency of the Year. It is much smaller than most of its competitors at the big agency holding companies that have invested vast sums in talent, technology and data to build large, complex organizations to leverage the burgeoning programmatic media marketplace to drive efficiency via automation and effectiveness, more precise audience targeting and real-time measurement of campaign results. It's also a lot younger than most its peers. USIM's programmatic media-buying unit is less than two years old.

It didn't happen overnight. In fact it took several long years of planning and strategic acquisitions for iProspect, now under parent company Dentsu Aegis Network, to build its position as OMMA Search Agency of The Year. One of those buyouts brought in Covario, which in 2013 won the title for the third consecutive time. The leadership team steps into the spotlight, but this time under a new umbrella.