Eoghan Nolan, chief, Think & Son

Running the risk of sycophancy considering whose pages these are, my pick of the year is the TV campaign launching The Irish Times Saturday magazine. Working to the simple and sturdy strategy of absorbing reading, the three executions created by McConnells were deftly shot by Lenny Abrahamson of Speers Films.

In one, a young mother lost in reading the product absent-mindedly puts a spongy pot-scourer in her child's lunchbox, while wiping down the kitchen sink with a ham sandwich. In the next in the series, Waiting Room, we find a tweedy man in a doctor's waiting room. He's engrossed in the product and is oblivious to the growing number of patients. Eventually, a nurse calls him and we realise the tweedy man himself is the doctor.

In commercial three, the most understated and least seen, a young man holds on the phone, writhing in call-waiting hell while all of the operators are busy reading the product.

This campaign has a pleasantly gentle intelligence about it. The casting is as near perfect as Irish commercials get and the soundscape restrained. All three commercials have a warm, sure-footed naturalism and assurance that makes this campaign stand out - certainly among its Irish-made peers.

The most engaging feature of this campaign is that it isn't dumbed down. The Irish Times is making as extravagant and hyperbolic a claim about its product as the next advertiser, but it has enough confidence in the media-literacy and all-round intelligence of the consumer to make the claim firmly and entertainingly - and leave it at that. There are just too many advertising communications aimed at some mysterious lowest common denominator.

It's been said that most intelligent people ignore advertising because most advertising ignores intelligent people. Thankfully that isn't true of these small gems.