Another year, another portflio of work to flaunt at the Agency of the Year awards.

The 2022 program officially kicks off today, with strategy asking agencies to submit the names of the campaigns they intend to enter before May 30.

Agency of the Year is an annual competition where agencies across different disciplines – creative, media, digital, PR and design – vie for the title of Canada’s top shops based on a portfolio of work.

What to do now?

Starting today, agencies will need to fill out this form before May 30 in order to state their intent to enter the program.

In it, they will submit the (1) name of the client, (2) the name of the campaign, and (3) the dates when the campaign was in market, for the five (for Agency of the Year) and/or three (Media, Digital, PR, Design or Small Agency of the Year) cases they plan to submit in full.

As always, the work must have launched in the 12-month period from June 2021 to June 2022. All of the campaigns have to be for different brands, cannot include self-promotional work and must be Canadian (if it’s a global campaign created here, it must have appeared in this market).

There is also a strict no double-dipping policy: agencies must submit unique campaigns for each competition. For example, an agency can’t enter the same work for a specific CPG brand in Agency of the Year and Design AOY, even if it just includes design-driven creative (like a poster or website) that was a part of the overall campaign also entered into AOY.

The entry fee ($850) is payable when the cases are uploaded and is a cost per agency for each award category, not per case.

What comes next?

Once an agency’s campaigns have been vetted and approved by the editorial team, they will be invited to submit their full written case studies and visual assets for our expert judges to review.

This year, strategy opened the submission portal at the same time as the first “intent to enter” phase so that agencies can begin uploading their full case studies as soon as they are approved. Note: Agencies should not begin uploading cases until they have been approved for entry by strategy‘s editorial team.

The submission portal also opens today April 18 and will close on June 20. 

Following this phase, the cases in each category will be judged by senior Canadian agency executives and marketers to determine a shortlist of agencies, which will be announced later in the summer. The Gold, Silver and Bronze winners for each competition will be revealed this fall, and winning portfolios will once again be published in strategy‘s end-of-year magazine, continuing our long-held tradition.

To read about last year’s winners and for more extensive entry details, visit the Agency of the Year website.