On the surface, we named Kinesso agency of the year based on a reboot. Below the surface, it's about fixing two big ad industry problems: misaligned incentives and information asymmetry.

If 2023 was "the Year of AI" on Madison Avenue, it began for Omnicom in 2018. That's the year it introduced its AI-powered OS Omni. Last year, it rolled out Omni 3.0, integrated more closely with Sparks & Honey's Q, and acquired Freewheel Digital.

Most of us think of big ideas as lightbulb moments, but the reality is they usually start as napkin moments, like the one Jared Belsky scribbled out in the summer of 2021 to outline a roadmap for a new kind of agency, Acadia.

While OpenAI is not an agency per se, it is a highly creative technology platform that has had an outsized impact on the agency world over the past year.

Dentsu did something few thought it would accomplish this year. The holding company merged Merkle's media capabilities into iProspect, a performance creative agency. 2023 has been a transformative year for search marketers, with generative artificial intelligence (GAI) becoming the technology to drive automation. Companies took huge steps to supplement data being taken away by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others based on government regulations to protect consumers. Agencies have attempted to fill those voids with technology. Despite the potential in combining two of the most successful agencies within Dentsu, there has been some grumbling across the ad industry that …

E.L.F. Beauty keeps turning unexpected media moves into spectacular growth. It was chosen as MediaPost's Client of the Year for its media choices that make others say, "Damn, why didn't we think of that?"

While some award-winners tackled the two biggest media challenges facing advertisers - information asymmetry and misaligned incentives - OpenAP leveraged both, but not necessarily in the best direction.

MediaPost selected Koenigsberg as our media executive of the year for his irrepressible sense of restlessness, his insatiable entrepreneurial spirit, and for knowing when the time is right to transition to something -- or someone -- else.