• by The Editor , October 24, 2024

Apologies for the slight delay in this year’s announcement for nominations to our annual “Agency of the Year” awards, but we took some time to huddle and rethink whether the franchise – after a quarter of a century – should be updated or rebooted in some way.

In the end, we’re just tweaking a couple of the categories and extending the deadline for submissions until Dec. 31 to both give you more time, and also to ensure the annual awards reflect a full calendar year of what our candidates and winners have been up to.

One thing that’s not changing is our criteria. We continue to look for anything a nominee has done in the past 12 months that demonstrate vision, innovation and industry leadership vis a vis how they used media to market brands to consumers.

You can see profiles of past year’s winners here to review who and what delivered on that in past year’s awards.

As always, the awards are only a reflection of what people tell us, and what we glean from our year-round observations of the advertising and media marketplace, so I once again encourage you to tell us your stories. What we’re looking for is great ideas and executions, even if they don’t necessarily have the proof points and KPIs yet to prove how they’ve delivered. We’re more interested in how agencies, advertisers and their supporting supply chain are innovating the use of media in ways that move the entire industry forward. In many cases, that requires taking risks that don’t always bear fruit, but nonetheless lead to better things.

As we rethink these awards going forward, we’d appreciate hearing from you directly about what you think about them, how they are differentiated from other similar industry awards, and what we can do to make them better.

As always, you can contact joe@mediapost.com and I’ll keep anything you share confidential.

The categories for this year’s awards include:

• Media Agency of the Year

• Holding Company of the Year

• Independent Agency of the Year

• Creative Agency of the Year

• Marketer of the Year

• Agency Executive of the Year

And just to remind you, our Dec. 31 deadline is legit and will not be extended. Sorry about that.