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."

According to Schwartz, the creative process with Nissan was a little more straightforward. The campaign's objective? To shift the vehicle's perception from being what Schwartz terms "a deal car" (something people choose for economical reasons) to "a want car". The ensuing campaign was a television and web effort that followed web comedian Marc Horowitz as he lived in a Sentra for seven days straight. Rather than simply a clever gimmick, Schwartz says the creative was borne from a very strategic viewpoint. "We got some research where the key insight was that the people for whom the car was for lived what they called a morning-to-morning lifestyle," he says. "They'd get up in the morning, go to work, go to the gym, go out, hang out all night, and they might get in the wee hours of the morning and start all over again. We made the creative leap from that."

While Apple's infamous gag policy prohibits Los Angeles CD Duncan Milner from talking about the "Mac vs. PC" campaign too in-depth, he acknowledges that it's ultimately an advantage to work for a brand with such a well-established visual identity. "Everything they do is so artful and beautiful and clean and elegant - we're always following their lead," he says. "It makes the box smaller, but it's so clearly defined that I think it makes it easier. It also makes things easy when you're working with incredibly talented people like Logan or Mark Romanek. That's part of the culture of Chiat... we always try to surround ourselves with the most talented people to create good ideas."

That kind of proactive and positive working atmosphere, says McBride, plays a huge part in continuing to separate the agency from a lot of its peers. The culture is such that it demands its creatives do next-level work just as a function of being there. "I think the reason TBWA has succeeded over the last three years, in addition to Gerry doing such an extraordinary job, is that the system has allowed the creative people to go out and try to be difference makers," he says. "Within each office, everybody knows that's their charge, and collectively, at an agency like Chiat, we understand that we have permission to do something great."

And as Schwartz points out, the constant presence of a certain someone provides an added spark that makes it hard to lose sight of that high water mark. "At the end of the day, Lee Clow is walking the hallways, and I think it adds an extra element of desire," he says. "We always want to make our clients wildly successful and do work that our peers both envy and admire, but we also want Lee to come by and go 'Hey, that thing you did, that was pretty cool'."

TBWA\Chiat\Day www.tbwa.com

THE HONOR ROLL
Five great spots from TBWA in 2006

Combos> "Videogame"
Dir: Martin Granger / Moxie
Supported by the tagline "What your Mom would feed you if your Mom were a man", this campaign shovelled a man's man of not-insignificant carriage into a wig and apron, and set him free to perform his matronly duties from a decidedly testosterone-rich perspective. In "Videogame", he pummels his kids at PlayStation and then inhales a handful of the cheese-filled somethings, sarkily declaring them fit for winners only.

PlayStation 3> "Doll"
Dir: Rupert Sanders / MJZ
Flourescent lights buzz to life and reveal a white room, in which a toy from a bygone generation sits diametrically opposed the sleek, flint-colored PS3. In this spot, one of a handful from the campaign, a plastic doll's lolling eyelids spurt tears after an intense staredown with the Death Star-looking console. The message? This isn't your ordinary plaything...

Skittles> "Leak"
Dir: Tom Kuntz / MJZ
A tenant notices a colorful leak in his living room ceiling and calls the superintendent to fix it. The super examines the patch, nods in recognition and mounts a tiny handlebar directly underneath it, on which he hangs a lilliputian man whose sole duty is to catch the Skittles in his mouth as they rain down. Boggles the tenant: "That's how you fix it?" Yup. That's how you fix it.

WTC Memorial Foundation> "Where Were You?"
Dir: Joe Pytka / Pytka
Rather than go for the jugular with a sensationalized emotional appeal, this piece evokes the tragedy of 9/11 in a decidedly more subdued manner. A montage of people standing in the very spots they occupied when the towers fell, "Where Were You?" handles a difficult subject with gravitas and class.

Sprint/Nextel> "Locker Room"
Dir: Bryan Buckley / Hungry Man
Tremendously well-received upon its Super Bowl debut, "Locker Room" finds a couple of regular lunchbox Joes locking horns over who has the most feature-rich phone. The mobile measuring contest escalates until the guy on the left touts his phone's "crime deterrent" feature, and promptly chucks it at his competitor's face.