Belgium has awards for the film, the idea, the media plan and the campaign. Agency of the Year is the one that looks behind all of it - at the business, the people and the model that made the work possible. We co-organize it, together with Media Marketing.
The 2026 edition, in numbers.
Our industry is very good at celebrating output. The idea, the craft, the effectiveness, the media buy - each has its own show, its own jury, its own night out. And rightly so.
But behind every one of those campaigns sits a company. People who were hired, trained and kept. A pricing model that has to hold. New business that has to come in. A structure that has to survive the next market shift. That part - the actual business of running an agency - had no stage at all.
So Media Marketing and IKAg built one. Agency of the Year asks a different question than every other award: not what did you make this year, but what did you become.
Everyone judges the work. Somebody had to judge the company that makes the work possible.
Agency of the Year is co-organized by IKAg (formerly PitchPoint) and Media Marketing.
Entering is not a vanity exercise. For most agencies it is the cheapest, fairest access they will ever get to the people who hand out the briefs.
Not peers. Not press. Senior marketers from brands and organizations, a different panel every year, chaired from the client side. They read every entry, in full, with real attention. Where else do ten decision-makers sit down and study your agency for an evening?
Most awards ask for a campaign. This one asks for the agency: your positioning, your numbers, your new business, your culture, your bet on where the market is going. Writing that down is worth something even if you never win.
A title here is not a line on a shelf. It is a signal to clients, to prospects, to the talent you are trying to hire, and to the people already in the building - who rarely get to hear that the thing they built is good.
The rhythm is the same every year, and it is deliberately demanding. An award that is easy to win is not worth winning.
The categories and the jury chair are announced. You choose where you have a real story to tell - you can enter more than one.
A written dossier on the agency itself: results, growth, new business, people, positioning, reinvention. Executive summary, hard figures, no fluff.
The jury reads everything and selects the finalists. Those finalists then present their dossier live, in person, to the full panel of advertisers.
Gold, silver and bronze per category, handed out in front of the whole industry. And an after party, because the industry insists.
You do not have to be the biggest agency in the country to walk out with a trophy. You have to be the most convincing at what you actually do.
The star category, edition by edition. Winning it once is hard. Winning it four times is something else entirely.
This is the star category only. Every edition also crowns a newcomer, a specialist, an innovator, an entrepreneur and a workplace - dozens of agencies have taken one home. The full palmares, per category and per year, lives on agencyoftheyear.be.
IKAg co-organizes Agency of the Year, guards the rules and makes sure every dossier gets the same honest reading. The scoring is done entirely by advertisers. No agency sits in judgement of another agency, and no entry fee, no partnership and no relationship with us has ever moved a single point on a jury sheet. Same principle as the rest of our work: we referee, we don't play.
Thinking about entering, or curious whether your story is strong enough to put in front of a jury of advertisers? Ask us. We read these dossiers for a living.