There's an old sports adage that says the only thing harder than winning a major title is repeating. If that logic extends to the advertising world, TBWA\Chiat\Day have officially topped their own stellar Agency of the Year-winning performance from 2005. But where last year's reel shone on the strength of standout work for Adidas ("Hello Tomorrow"), Starburst ("Art Center") and Pedigree ("We're For Dogs"), this year saw TBWA scoop top agency honors for a whole other raft of clients. With breakout campaigns for Skittles, Combos, PlayStation 3 and Nissan as well as continued strong work for perennial standbys like Apple, Sprint-Nextel and Fox Sports, the key words for TBWA's 2006 were 'breadth' and 'depth'.

That has a lot to do with the continued strengthening of the agency's New York office, which, under ECD Gerry Graf and creative directors Ian Reichenthal and Scott Vitrone, has quietly and studiously knocked out some of the funniest campaigns of the last five years. Christened with a brutally honest new tagline, snack brand Combos is the latest to enjoy a creative repositioning at the hands of the New York braintrust. "It kind of is the quintessential junk food, guy food, roadtrip food," says Vitrone. "We blew up that line 'What your Mom would feed you if your Mom were a man' huge on a board, and when we unveiled it, the client's heads started to nod. They got the connection immediately."

Elsewhere, the office went further down the rabbit hole with increasingly dadaist comedic setups for Skittles (see sidebar, pg. 25) and Starburst, for which they demonstrated an uncanny knack for oddball casting and comedic deadpan. Factor in the elegant and appropriate one-off for the World Trade Center Foundation (the moving "Where Were You?") and it's hard to argue with the notion that Graf and company had their strongest showing yet.

San Francisco ECD Chuck McBride concurs. "This year has really been about the rise of New York," he says. "Chiat\Day has always been a west coast kind of place, and New York has always been a difficult solution. Even as far back as 15 years ago, it was a revolving door for a lot of people... I give Gerry and Ian and Scott full credit for making us look like a better agency holistically than we have in the past."

"I think the New York office culturally lost its way for a while there," offers Vitrone. "When it started, it shared a lot of the same values and attributes that LA had, but then it seemed to drift away and it wasn't until Gerry came in that it was recaptured. Prior to his arrival, it felt like just another agency in New York. He re-energized it with creativity and a what-the-fuck attitude. Gerry kicked it in the ass, brought in some people that elevated the work, and when the work's elevated, the culture changes."

For his own part, Graf greets the accolades with typical subduedness. "I don't think I did anything particular to clean things up," he shrugs. "I brought people like Scott, Ian and a bunch of other people into the creative department who believed me when I said they could come over here and do good work. We were fortunate enough to have a bunch of juniors right out of school because of a program that John Hunt had set up called the Youngblood program. We just started doing good work and good work is contagious."

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the country, the Los Angeles office put together a solid calendar year of its own. But while it managed to breathe new life into the previously unfashionable Nissan Sentra with the Marc Horowitz-starring "Seven Days In A Sentra" project and birth a compelling and oft-imitated campaign for Apple ("Mac vs. PC"), 2006 did not come without its fair share of ups and downs. Most of the drama revolved around the office's campaign for Sony's PlayStation 3. Plagued by a series of launch-date issues (most significantly a production slowdown that resulted in a crippling scarcity of available product), a prohibitive price tag and fierce competition from rival 7th generation consoles like Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii, ECD Rob Schwartz and the rest of his creative team initially struggled to find the right tone for the platform. Dizzy with the possibilities, but not particularly in love with any one of them, the office even devoted a significant amount of time to one particular campaign iteration before ultimately deciding to abandon it. "It was good but not good enough," says Schwartz. "There was no surprise to it. The work would unfold and you'd just go, 'Oh yeah, it's a videogame landscape.' There's a certain feel to videogame work and it's almost become a convention."

While the effect of going back to the drawing board at an advanced stage could well have been demoralizing, Schwartz seized upon the opportunity to put one of TBWA's trademark critical processes into action. The process, called disruption, afforded Schwartz and his team a new viewpoint from which to examine the product, and thus opened the door for the campaign's stark and sinister new identity. "When we looked at the clichés and conventions of the category, we saw there was some white space in simplicity and art," he explains. "That started to get us thinking about not doing things that assaulted people but that were pure and unfettered."

Re-energized by this new angle and an appropriately epic new tagline ("Play Beyond"), the office gave voice to a compelling campaign that subverted expected videogame norms by being, well, just a little bit creepy. "The category's getting very nice and welcoming," say Schwartz. "If you look around at the work, it's invitational. PlayStation is a leader; it's not so much about being invitational but about being magnetic and drawing people in versus pandering and opening up. I think PS3 wanted to usher in this third generation of gaming [knowing] that it was going to be beautiful, brilliant and at times a little bit scary."