Over the past 20-plus years, Anheuser-Busch ads have become sort of a sine qua non of the Super Bowl. The brewer has used the audience of more than 100 million to introduce expressions such as "Whassup" and stunts such as the Bud Bowl into the American lexicon. But oddsmakers wouldn't take the bet that InBev will keep Bud in the Bowl.

For the third consecutive year, MEDIA has selected the media team at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners as its "media department" of the year for 2009. Readers of the past two years' profiles already know how ironic that is, because gs&p claims it no longer has a media department, and has fused media planning and buying with its strategic planning team. Whatever you want to call it, the results have been something all agencies - full-service, stand-alone, integrated or otherwise - should take notice of. The editors of this magazine sure have.

We present our selections for the distinction of 2009 Agency of the Year

All too often, MEDIA's Agency of the Year profiles begin by rationalizing why we made the picks we did. We do that mainly for readers who may not have had the privilege of being exposed to the winner's work, which in the case of media services, sometimes may not be as visible as other forms of marketing communication. We didn't have that problem with MPG, which did some of its best work in the most open of forums - for all the industry to observe and, in fact, to participate in directly.

Calling Mediabrand's year kind of successful is like calling Super Bowl ads kind of pricey. It took Sherman longer to march through the Confederacy than it took for Interpublic's reimagined media services operating unit to rise from dormant to dominating.

Being a generally optimistic chap, I rarely fall victim to cynicism. But I've found myself wondering recently whether new media hasn't started to get, well ... a bit old.

With the holidays over and the second decade of the 21st century winding down, it's time to recap the highlights from the gift-giving season. As always, technology fueled the new must-have gifts as augmented reality completed its transformation from aesthetic value to core functionality. It's no surprise that was going to happen. The big surprise was how traditional retailers utilized ar and how it impacted holiday sales figures both in terms of where and how much was spent. Some retailers reported a 10 percent shift of total holiday sales to their Web-based outlets and others reported that year-on-year total sales …

My advertising mantra is "crawl, walk, run." While it is tempting to jump directly into the latest and greatest (think social or mobile), grounding a campaign in paid search (tried and true) is ultimately more efficient. Search is a reasonable basis for every campaign because it is a real-time focus group.

January columns are always ones for waxing on about the year ahead. And, rest assured, I will, but first let me talk a little about the year behind - very little. It sucked. It sucked so much so, that I watched a lot of good people - really good people - get displaced.

There is no denying that daytime soap operas - once the cash cows of the broadcast networks - have seen better days, and it's safe to say that we'll never see a return to those heady times when 30 million viewers tuned in for Luke and Laura's wedding on General Hospital back in 1981.