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In addition to having to top those numbers every holiday season until the entire world has repeatedly elfed itself, Toy may find that its biggest challenge is to leverage the success of the elves while not becoming beholden to them. In other words, it needs to do something equally amazing for someone else.

On my way out I shook hands with Bologna and waved good-bye to Merkin, who still may or may not have noticed me, and to Dabill, who was still talking to the squeegee guy. Back on the street, in front of the Grand Lodge of the Royal Order of Masons (where, incidentally, I was about to take an interesting tour), I decided while scribbling notes that Bologna, Merkin, and Dabill were right: Toy absolutely was not an advertising agency.

Because at a real agency, a founding partner would never have spoken with the squeegee guy.

Bankable

BBDO

Judging from the companies profiled on the preceding pages, one would think only small, quirky shops that renounce the word “advertising” can qualify as idea factories. Of course, this is hardly the case. Just about every working agency today qualifies, and some of the best—including the well-chronicled, paradigm-busting large agencies Wieden+Kennedy, the Martin Agency, and Crispin Porter + Bogusky—continue to create and innovate as well as or better than the smartest, nimblest idea factories. Google them or check out their Web sites and you’ll see.

But for tangible, debauchery-free proof that rumors of the death of the mega-agency are greatly exaggerated, consider the role that BBDO Worldwide, one of America’s largest and oldest agencies, enjoyed at Cannes. Long celebrated and eventually denigrated for its lavish, celebrity-dependent, Super Bowl-or-bust TV extravaganzas for A-list clients like Pepsi (Britney, Madonna, Michael Jackson), Visa (Derek Jeter, Michael Phelps), GE, and FedEx, BBDO has undergone a transformation under its chief creative officer of three years, David Lubars.

On the afternoon that we met at an outside table at the Hotel Majestic, Lubars was feeling particularly satisfied. His home office in New York had just won the Agency of the Year Lion as the most-awarded single agency at the festival, and BBDO Worldwide, the most-awarded network of agencies, was named Network of the Year. Winning awards was nothing new for BBDO. But winning them on the coattails of one dominant campaign that didn’t involve a single thirty-second television commercial was significant for the onetime TV factory.

The campaign, for BBDO’s longtime HBO client, was an integrated effort called “Voyeur.” The mission of “Voyeur,” which won ten Lions at Cannes (and was created with a significant yet not entirely substantiated assist from the digital production company Big Spaceship), was to position the cable network as the home of the greatest storytellers in the world.

Brands like to “own” things, and marketers are more than happy to accommodate. A case can be made that Target owns a certain Pantone of red. A coffee maker wants to “own” morning’s first pleasure. Once I worked for a fast-food client who wanted to “own” happiness. BBDO helped HBO lay claim to storytelling with a series of compelling, brilliantly synchronized short films directed by Jake Scott and set in eight apartments in a fictional Manhattan building. Each apartment has its own plot that builds to a common finale involving, within four minutes, tales of love, hate, birth, and murder. In 2A, for example, a couple discovers that their upstairs neighbor in 3A has a deadly secret. In 4A a strip-poker party takes an unexpected turn. For the premiere, the films were simultaneously projected on the side of an actual Manhattan apartment building before more than three thousand voyeurs on the corner of Ludlow and Broome, giving the illusion that its exterior wall had been stripped away.

But that was only one aspect of the campaign. More than 1.2 million viewers visited the HBO Voyeur micro-site, seeking additional background