Dunkin' donuts marketing in 2007 was as satisfying as that first sip of coffee in the morning. From the ubiquitous orange-and-pink signage to a tagline that actually means something, this New England-based company gave consumers back their cuppa joe.

Few companies can build real anticipation and excitement without heavy advertising, but Apple Inc. makes it look easy to get consumers in a frenzy.

Shaking off more than a century's worth of dust, the country's largest telecommunications carrier announced in December 2005 that it was changing up its image to give the old brand new life. It launched a marketing campaign that in 2007 put AT&T on the leading edge of hip cultural trends and aligned the brand with the hottest electronics-maker on the planet, Apple.

Our marketer of the year went from Bakelite to broadband in a single bound. Once regarded as a stodgy, if reliable, behemoth, American Telephone & Telegraph zipped from that old moniker to the slightly more serviceable SBC to the more current Cingular and back to AT&T, all in one nearly seamless year.

Most of Madison Avenue talked a good digital game in 2007, but it was Publicis Groupe that moved the most significant pieces. It has built the most well-positioned agency holding company in the increasingly crowded field of interactive marketing services.

When the editors of media first began contemplating candidates for this year's Media Agency of the Year honors, all the usual suspects came up - and for all the usually good reasons. But that's another story that you can read elsewhere in this publication. This story is about a not-so-usual candidate that we considered, tried to rationalize and ultimately discarded as our Media Agency of the Year, an act that led us to create a brand new category: Media Supplier of the Year. The winner should come as no surprise: Google.

Naturally, Paul Woolmington has something else to say. The peripatetic partner of New York's Naked Communications has just spent almost an hour being interviewed in advance of the agency's designation as 2007 Media Boutique of the Year, and now he wants to change the name of the award his shop is about to win.

At a time when most big marketers are trying to figure out how to let go of old school media strategies, one of the biggest, global packaged-goods giant Unilever, released all 10 digits at once. It took the plunge with the kind of freefall abandon that surprised many of its peers but is generating the kind of results that are encouraging others to follow suit. The speed, creativity and passion with which Unilever has embraced the shift from passive, one-way push media to digital, interactive and branded content that puts the consumer at the center, defies the long-held industry adage …

Like a handful of other media savvy brand agencies, the team at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners are usually on Media's short list for selection as Media Department of the Year. We picked them for 2007, in large part, because they abolished their media department during the past year. Well, they didn't actually get rid of it. They merged it with their account planning group to create a seamless "strategy department" that could well be the new model for the media department of the future. At a time when many voices in the industry are calling for greater integration between media, …

Starcom USA CEO John Muszynski isn't satisfied with winning media magazine's agency of the year award four times in a row. "I want 10," he says. He's halfway there, but this year, his agency will have to share the stage with a familiar name - sibling shop MediaVest. The Starcom MediaVest Group sisters tie for this year's honor for the same reasons - they are thought leaders for their industry and benchmarks for their competitors. But in what has become arguably the most highly functional corporate family in the media agency business, they took distinctly different paths to the top.