I should say at this point that I do not watch 'The Apprentice', I don't know who any of the people on it are and can't see why I should be concerned. What a frighteningly awful bunch of individuals.That said how hard can it be to come up with a brand and make a 30 second spot? Piece of cake right?Well on the evidence presented last night by a group of people who profess to be interested in business and what makes it work then the answer is a categorical "no".First the brands. One team did pretty well with a brand called Atischu and a brightly coloured yellow box. The second decided on blandness all the way both in terms of a startlingly unstriking product design and in the name for their brand 'I Love My tissues'.From that point out it was downhill. With one team producing a sub sub sub-standard spot from the used up old hack school of daytime advertising (Ocean Finance ads suddenly looking like works of a genius). The judges from Rory Sutherland (but where was the bowtie? Very disappointing) and Gary Leih gave it a muted thumbs up.With a script that was based on the idea that if you say the phrase "anti bacterial" often enough, people will get the idea that your tissues in your BRIGHTLY coloured box are "anti bacterial". Fair enough, I can remember that even this morning, although they still failed to add the why into equation. Yes its "anti bacterial", but why should I care? Okay because it kills all known germs dead? But they were almost there.The second team, went rank up the spaz metre to the full and got themselves a celebrity, but having come up with an idea centring on children rather than getting a mother or someone associated with children they got Sian Lloyd…who has no children and is associated with the weather. Maybe they were thinking, well you know the wind blows just like a nose…okay maybe not.The end product cut most of Sian Lloyd out and had a couple of school kids with crushes comforting each other as a little boy offered a tissue to a girl, but the product was completely incidental.Now, of course, this is okay if you are Cadbury and you are an established brand. As you have values, signage and more importantly very recognisable brand collateral (such as the colour purple).If you are a new brand you have none of those advantages, which means if you make some cute but meaningless piece of piss you will fall flat on your face as that team did. And really no surprise as they were led by somebody called "Raef" who seemed to be wearing more make-up than someone who wears a lot of make-up. Was that really pink lipgloss? Oh boy. He got his arse fired and we all learned something well more than one thing really.Firstly pink lipstick is not a good look on "straight" men and secondly, yes, most advertising is crap, but it is crap that quite adequately sells the products that it is designed to promote; and lastly people working in advertising might actually it seems know a thing or two about which they speak. We live and learn.
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Gordon Macmillan
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 25 Nov 2009
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