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It remains the most notorious night in advertising history—June 13, 1991.
The Clio Awards were scheduled to hand out their radio and print awards. But as Adweek later told the story, "what ensued was less an ad-award show than a tawdry circus, an event so grossly mismanaged that its trajectory from embarrassing to appalling seemed, in retrospect, almost destined—'beyond the beyond-o,' as Ruth Ayres of DDB Needham put it.
"The ceremony started late, was hosted largely by the caterer, featured presenters who (when they weren't singing Irish lullabies) tried to guess the agency winners since they had no list, and was aborted when fevered, greedy ad types rushed the stage in a mad grab for Clios they hadn't won."
It was quite the shameful scene indeed.
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