BEHIND THE SCENES: A BREAKDOWN OF THE FINAL SCORES

The Agency of the Year competition is judged by two separate panels: a creative panel of agency types and a strategic panel of client marketers. As you can see below, the top shops are the agencies that strike the right balance between strategy and creativity:

HOW DO YOU GET TO BE AGENCY OF THE YEAR?

This year, as always, the process began by selecting which agencies would be invited to take part. This was based on a poll of 50 client marketers and creatives in the advertising community.

Key to our selection was this question: From all that you have seen and heard, which agencies stand out on the basis of their work over the past year? (We also had a memory-jogging list of the major campaigns.)

Each agency earned a score based on the number of "yes" votes it received and seven agencies were invited to take part.

In alphabetical order, they are: Bensimon Byrne, Cossette Communication-Marketing, J. Walter Thompson, Palmer Jarvis DDB, Rethink, Taxi and Zig.

Then we chose the judges: seven agency creatives for the creative panel and six marketing executives for the strategic panel. The judges had no say in which agencies could participate.

In order to bring the broadest possible perspective to the competition, our judging panel included representation from the Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver markets. We also included international members from the U.S., the U.K. and even the Netherlands.

In the second stage of the process, each agency was asked to submit five advertising ideas representing work done for five different clients over the previous 12 months.

Each agency could enter whatever work it wanted, but all were advised to bear in mind that the judges would be scoring on the basis of an agency's ability to work in different product categories and across different media.

Working in isolation, the judges were then instructed to score each agency's submission on a scale of 0 to 10.

Each agency's scores from the strategic panel were totaled and averaged, as were the scores from the creative panel. The creative and strategic scores had equal weighting on the final score.

The agency with the highest final score claimed the prize.