From over 120 agency folk, around 15 teams and under some salubrious conditions in both Auckland and Wellington, we have again identified the smartest agencies in both regions. This year was probably the toughest yet, with a particularly difficult anagrams section that left most participants a little cross-eyed.

Comments we had from both nights were:

“Thanks for yet another brilliant BBC quiz night. So much fun and we’re stoked to have taken it out again. I hear some of the team stayed on and partied well. So sorry I couldn’t stick around.”

“Hey Adhubsters, Thanks for last night – it was fun. I think we came a close third in the end which wasn’t too bad…”

“My head hurts……”

“Ditto. I dont feel so smart now! Thanks for the good night, sir”

“Thanks for the good times last night. I’m hungover as a mo’ fo’ but it was worth it”

“Thanks for last night, great event, good to see you all and team.  Hell, I think I even learned some stuff – Texas a Spanish town until as late as 1821?  How about that.  Special thanks to Nadia please who was the super host, tracking down some calamari for me after whinging like some agency prick that I didn’t eat chicken.”

And the winners were…

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The Winning Promotus Team

It’s been another successful year for the BBC.com Smartest Agency Cup. Last year was all about the big shops with OMD (in Wellington) and DraftFCB (In Auckland) taking out the cups in their markets respectively. This year (drum-roll please) the winners are…

the indies, with Promotus in Wellington and Barnes, Catmur & Friends in Auckland. Competition was fierce and drinks did flow. Our adhub/BBC.com team was suitably humbled when we misguidedly entered a “dummy” team into the Wellington event. And we all feel a little worse for wear today after two very fun nights in both markets.

With around 600,000 UBs (many of NZ’s media people among them) in any given month, you’d think it’d be harder to stump participants with questions like – “what colour is the official BBC logo (answer – red)?” or “how many sports are covered on the BBC.com site (answer – 46)?”

Having said that, there were some very, very smart people in every team, flexing their cerebral muscle over a drink or two and leaving one with a definite sense that NZ’s media landscape is in pretty smart shape.

We’re building our mobile offerings across adhub sites, with FLICKS, BBC.com & Sella leading the way in iphone apps. Sella recently launched what is certainly the most useful trading application in New Zealand today and we’ve run some very successful campaigns for major brands on both FLICKS and BBC.com’s .mobile sites.

The following are Adam Cahill’s (of ClickZ) top 10 points for creating value and relevance with your customer

s from a keynote he attended with Emily Nagle Green, president and CEO of Yankee Group:

1. Mobile increases consumer expectations of connectedness. We tend to evaluate new opportunities with a tipping point mentality, asking ourselves “when is the opportunity big enough to take seriously?” The statistics already tell us that mobile has reached that point, but I loved how Emily reframed the issue away from hard facts and toward a very clear picture of the way behavior has changed as a result of the powerful computers we carry with us in our pockets and purses. Simply put, we expect more, all the time. Instead of thinking about whether mobile is big enough, we should be thinking about what expectations we’d actually be failing to meet without a thoughtful approach to mobile in place. Read the rest of this article.