Normally, this category recognizes suppliers of media inventory, data or technology, but in a MediaPost first, we're naming an industry watchdog.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, but on Madison Avenue, it frequently fathers innovation.

360i plans to automate a "significant" amount of processes throughout the agency in 2020, pulling out the mundane tasks and giving them to machines. A team has been meeting regularly to work on seven initiatives around automation. One, for example, takes proficiencies learned from search during the past 20 years and applies them across the agency in other media.

When two of Madison Avenue's most venerable agency brands -- J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather -- spun off their media departments to form a new dedicated media services unit in 1999, parent WPP chose to brand it with a name that was more of a promise than a reality: Mindshare.

While it's not uncommon for MediaPost to recognize the same organizations years in a row as our media agencies of the year, our selection of Omnicom as this year's holding company of the year is the first time we've done so two years in a row for the same reason. Sort of.

In a year when many retailers are circling the drain, Target is thriving.

Among BBDO's new business wins this year were two assignments from Facebook, including one that named it creative agency for the social network's global messaging brand WhatsApp.

Brien has been a leader in the advertising and media business for most of his career, much of the time turning around companies that had come off the tracks.