Hasta La Creative!

It’s almost Halloween time. Think: Oogie-boogie and all that bumping around in the dark, candy, beer, costumes, what fun! But, what about the other side of Halloween? The dark, grisly underbelly of pure evil? Don’t think advertising executives are exempt from doing the unthinkable. Here’s the Agency Spy list of Diabolical Deeds, from bribery to bomb threats and even… murder.

1. Jean Brault was the president of Groupaction, a Montreal advertising firm, when his company was implicated in the Canadian Federal Sponsorship scandal known as AdScam. He was charged with fraud and testified that Groupaction funneled over $1 million to the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party of Canada in exchange for sponsorship contracts.

In early 2005, Brault pleaded not guilty to six charges of fraud. In 2006, Brault changed his mind and pleaded guilty to five charges including paying salaries to Liberal party workers who never did any work for his company. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

2. In 1981, Young & Rubicam was charged with bribing Jamaican officials with almost $1 million to land the Jamaica Tourist Board’s advertising account. In the first criminal indictment of an advertising agency under Federal racketeering laws. The execs named in the filing were Arthur R. Klein, president and chief executive of Y&R’s New York office, and Thomas Spangenberg, a former senior vice president at the agency. Steven M. McKenna, the chief financial officer of Wunderman Worldwide, was charged with perjury. All charges were dropped after Young & Rubicam pleaded guilty in February 1990 to one count of conspiring to bribe officials and paid a $500,000 fine.

See the remaining seven after the jump…

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