What sort of a year has it been for Firstborn? "Well, shooting a guy in an animatronic bear costume was definitely a first," senior vice president and executive director Dan LaCivita says with a laugh.

We bestowed the bronze award in search to GroupM Search - which isn't a search agency at all, in the traditional sense. And that's part of the reason they won. As the line between digital and traditional blurs, and clients consolidate their media buys, GroupM has responded by breaking the walls between search, interactive and traditional.

Schematic spent a decade helping clients like Coca-Cola, Walt Disney and Target make their marks on the Web. Still, it remained "this plucky little boutique shop that nobody had heard of," says chief technology officer Matthew Rechs, who has been with the company almost since its inception.

At the beginning of 2008, OMD promised to put digital at its strategic core. A year later, account wins and stellar cross-media creative show the approach is a winner.

It's been a little more than two years since Publicis said it would buy Digitas for $1.3 billion, and it seems fair, even now, to wonder whether the vibrant independent digital organ that was Digitas could have been rejected by patient Publicis, the big holding company that at the time had arguably the smallest digital footprint of its competitors.