PROCESS

Behind the scenes: A breakdown of the final scores

The Agency of the Year is selected by two separate panels: a creative panel of agency types and a strategic panel of client marketers. The top shops impress both.

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 45 creatives and client marketers 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 last 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 round two.

Next we chose the judges: six agency creatives and six marketing executives, from across Canada as well as the international advertising centres of London, New York, and, well, Stamford, Conn. Judges had no say in which agencies would participate.

Each of the selected agencies was then asked to submit five advertising ideas representing work executed for five different clients over the previous 12 months. The agencies were free to choose what to submit, but 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 instructed to score each agency's submission on a score of 0 to 10. The cumulative scores from both panels were totaled and averaged, with equal weighting. The agency with the highest final score claimed the prize.