The Process

For the first time, the MAOY process began this spring with an open call to media agencies across the country. Agencies answered the call by submitting brief descriptions of three media campaigns from the past year, which were put to a poll of 50 media agency executives, media sellers and client marketers from across Canada, who were asked which shops stood out on the basis of their work. Points were earned based on the number of times a particular agency was selected to be on the shortlist.

The agencies invited to participate in the second round of the MAOY competition were Carat, Cossette, Initiative, M2 Universal, Media Experts, MediaCom, Mediaedge:cia, Mindshare, OMD, PHD, Starcom MediaVest Group and Zenith Optimedia. Each shortlisted agency then submitted three media campaigns representing work executed for three different brands over the previous 12 months.

While in past years the jury has been divided into two panels – creative (agency judges) and strategic (marketer judges) – this year we refined the process by asking the judges to provide a creative and strategic mark for each campaign (previously they were restricted to a single mark per agency). Working in isolation, the judges gave each campaign an overall score of zero to 10 based on strategic insight and the ability to execute creatively. Judges who declared conflicts were omitted from the scoring on relevant cases and/or agencies.

The scores were then totalled and averaged, with equal weighting. The agency with the highest final score was the winner.

The MAOY jury also selected the Media Director of the Year and the 2009 Next Media Star, J3 Canada’s Trevor Bozyk, announced at strategy’s ATOMIC event last month.

The Scores

Here are the judges’ averages that determined the 2009 Media Agency of the Year.

Creative scores

Strategic scores

Overall scores
AgencyScore AgencyScore AgencyScore

Cossette

9.06

Starcom MediaVest Group

8.20

Starcom MediaVest Group

8.23

Starcom MediaVest Group

8.31

OMD

8.14

OMD

8.09

OMD

8.03

Media Experts

7.83

Cossette

8.07

PHD

7.79

M2 Universal (tie)

7.50

Media Experts

7.74

Media Experts

7.65

Zenith Optimedia (tie)

7.50

PHD

7.64

Zenith Optimedia

7.53

PHD

7.49

Zenith Optimedia

7.52

Mediaedge:cia

7.25

Carat

7.26

M2 Universal

7.20

M2 Universal

7.10

Mediaedge:cia

7.25

Mediaedge:cia

7.25

MediaCom

7.02

Cossette

7.08

MediaCom

7.05

Mindshare

6.96

MediaCom

7.07

Carat

7.04

Carat

6.81

Mindshare

6.87

Mindshare

6.92

Initiative

6.68

Initiative

6.83

Initiative

6.76