AOL’s Running Man beat Mr Clean and the Red and Yellow M&Ms to clinch the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame award at Advertising Week, the annual autumn meeting of advertising executives in New York.

Even as executives gathered under a crowded tent in New York’s Times Square to fete the internet company’s rise from the rubble, one group quietly joked that AOL’s yellow, eyeless, noseless icon’s win underscored the cloudy state of affairs in the media industry as companies move out of a period of record declines fraught with uncertainty.