Yo! I’ve been off until, um, just now, and I’d like to draw your attention to a change in AdAge. The magazine has rejiggered the way they calculate their Agency Hot List. “Our previous format for choosing the cream of the agency world, in which we graded a number of agencies and selected an agency of the year, began to show its age when we realized that, thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, we knew too little about the financial performance of many of the businesses we were grading. That format was also too narrowly focused on ad agencies – and thus increasingly out of touch with a marketing world in which many of the best ideas don’t have anything to do with ads.”
Yes, lets mess with the calculations. The new AdAge criteria relies on what it always should have relied on: creative strategies, measurable results, and gaining revenue. It really just seems like the magazine is trying to be more inclusive by looking at digital, marketing, media and gaming… Oh no. Not gaming and not mobile. Nope. Not yet, kids, which is a shame because there are a few companies, such as area/code which deserve to be on this list. and other types of agencies. So, who made their tops of the pops?
1. Crispin Porter & Bogusky
2. TBWA/Chiat/Day
3. Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
4. R/GA
5. Tribal DDB
6. Mindshare
7. Martin Agency
8. Vidal Partnership
9. Rapp
10. Deutsch
Initiative, Edelman, AKQA, Latinworks, Droga5, Venables Bell, Conill, Cramer-Krasselt, Ketchum and Wunderman were the runner-ups. Fine. All good shops. Basically, the difference is that they have a larger representation of multi-cultural ad agencies (Conill, Vidal, etc) and they’ve thrown in some media shops. Pretty standard stuff. If you read Adweek’s list then there’s no need to check out AdAge’s. Same thing basically. Not impressed. Nor surprised. No highlights here. Next?