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

Watching episodes of today's low-budget, limited-run Web soaps (with their average running times of approximately five minutes), it is difficult to imagine the genre developing into something that might rival or replace the daytime dramas of broadcast television. But remember, television soaps in their infancy ran for only 15 minutes and were shot with static cameras in black and white (and those were a quantum leap from the radio serials before them). In the '50s and early '60s, it was unimaginable that soaps would blossom into the handsomely produced, big-budget extravaganzas that they became in the '80s and early '90s.

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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.

Here's to the future we live in. It's 2010, a favorite time period among science-fiction writers, when fantastically advanced technology would be infused into everything that surrounds us. Computers would take on new forms and wait attentively for our next command, intergalactic travel becomes commonplace, and flying cars dot the skies to relieve the earth's crowded surface and serve as a symbol for our ingenious solution to breaking the bonds of gravity that held us to the ground for so many centuries. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?

What the great recession has wrought is not what is popularly supposed. One common view, perhaps the most widely proclaimed, is that the recessionary experience of frugality has ushered in an enduring era of penny-pinching and thrift that will wholly define the character and mindset of the recovery consumer marketplace to come. The consumer, it is said, has been changed altogether.

Instead of behaving like a mob of meerkats, nervously scanning the post-recession landscape for the next scary thing to send us scurrying into our holes, it's time to bring the strategy and impact back to media. The best place to start isn't just spending more, but spending more intelligently, thinking of media as a user experience. (And not just flow charts and efficiencies.)