As we left off from last week, Melissa has been fired and Kristi, 24, a top sales executive for Gold Creek Golf Club as made it to the second episode. This is my overview from last week:
Sage Lewis: The Apprentice 4 Episode 1 – Season Premiere
The men wanted Melissa to come back, from a strategy point of view. They feel Melissa is weaker… which she is. But I don’t feel like there is tremendous threat coming from Kristie. It’s all about marketing, and she’s not a great marketing.
They all meet at Trump Park Tower to talk about their task. The group is going to work with The Kaplan Thaler Group Ltd., an ad agency on Madison Avenue. They are going to put together a 30 second promotional and print ad campaign for Lamborghini.
Linda Kaplan Thaler, the CEO and chief creative officer of Kaplan Thaler and Erin Bragg, head of US operations of Lamborghini, are the executives who will judge the campaigns.
This is the Lamborghini Site.
In this season, the winning team has to vote whether or not the team captain is excluded from the vote this week. Marcus does not get excluded.
Chris from Excel is the team captain for this.
The show starts right out by putting Marcus in a bad light. He has a campaign slogan right out of the gate, “Smooth as silk” that the guy from Lamborghini immediately does not like.
My instinct is that Marcus is bad… mostly because he appears to not stop talking. But I also get the feeling that they are also editing him in a pretty bad way.
Marshawn is the project manager for the women. It appears that the women are going right into shooting the car.
Episode 2’s lesson is “Be flexible”. Donald says you must adapt otherwise you will never be able to make it in business. Absolutely a truism. You can’t fail if you adapt and persist.
The men are considering taking a vintage Lamborghini and morphing it into the new Lamborghini.
Marcus’ teammates are giving him a hard time saying he is the weakest link. Marcus is removed of all responsibility in apparently not being able to direct traffic.
Back at Capital Edge (the women), Marshawn is working with the photos. She sends three others to work on the video editing. Alla, Kristi and Jen are running the video. Marshawn not showing up in that editing makes them mad. You start to see some patterns in this show. Marshawn is nowhere to be found in the video editing. That could be some foreshadowing.
Excel Corp is in love with their idea, as Carolyn points out, which is an Achilles heal. The men feel like they can guarantee the victory. When you are in love with your idea, you are infatuated. When you have just fallen in love, you never see as clearly as you do when you are in calm state.
Both sides have some problems. My instinct is that both campaigns are going to have problems with the executives.
Randal is heading out to his grandmother’s funeral in the middle of the task. He choppers out to Philadelphia. It’s presented very well. He has not been focused on negatively or positively. He feels that he will be motivated and inspired by his grandmother as he moves forward. A little reality in my reality TV, that’s always refreshing.
The women make their presentation. The Lamborghini executive says their presentation was very good. It looked disjointed to me. The words that the women focused on didn’t seem to gel.
“Men say it, women feel it,” Linda Kaplan Thaler says. Linda says that the men use just words. Capital Edge wins clearly because the women made the executives feel it.
The women, all except Kristi, all exempt her from firing if their team loses next week. VERY interesting. The men use logic to maybe never exempt a leader. And the women exempt Marshawn, even though several of them had clear problems with her. They are building loyalty and commitment. Great strategy. Your team is your team… even if they ultimately are your competition. This is a great lesson. You must always be compassionate, kind and thoughtful. It makes your social unit strong. And that’s the only way you can win in anything. We’ll see if the women really understand this or if it’s just an early season fluke.
Rebecca sprains her ankle in the task reward of learning how to play hockey. Bummer.
Excel gets ready to head to the board room.
Markus, the inventor, is harping on the “Green with envy” campaign. He misses the point. It wasn’t the words that were used. It was that words were all that were used. Markus is annoying and should go.
Chris, the team leader, says they lost because of distractions. George points out that they were too sure of themselves. Carolyn points out that the men have to explain everything. The men focus on Markus. Trump says that Markus was the only person who didn’t like the campaign. Markus was right, Trump says.
Chris brings in Markus. Trump has made it very clear that he isn’t unhappy with Markus in this task. Again, this bringing back one person seems super risky. And in this case, versus last week where Kristi only brought in Melissa, I think Chris may be in trouble here. You are taking your odds of getting fired from 33% to 50%. Bad pot odds.
Chris loved this campaign and it was the campaign to the core, that get shot down. Chris is a bad strategist all the way around. He won’t be long for The Apprentice one way or the other.
Back to the show. Carolyn was behind Chris. Both George and Carolyn point out that only bringing Markus back was a critical mistake. Chris could have brought back Mark who made many errors. Chris admits that he marginalized Markus so Markus was not given a chance to perform. Chris says he believed in Mark’s decisions. So Mark’s decision was Chris’ decision. Chris is fired because he made a bad strategic decision at the board room. Trump told him what to do and he didn’t listen. Trump liked Chris. But he just brought it on himself.
“Stay flexible”. Chris decided he was going to bring Markus back alone and wasn’t able to change in mid board room.
OK, here’s a note on the end of the show. We are told to go to Yahoo and search for “apprentice dream car.” There are two pay per click ads above the Apprentice web site. It would have cost them very little to buy one of those ads. There is a Yahoo Shortcut to this listing. This site notice looks to be paid for by Yahoo. The link takes us to http://autos.yahoo.com/newcars/sportscars.html
Also, it would have been very easy to create a page on The Apprentice web site that had the title, “Apprentice Dream Car”. They would have been able to come up in all of the engines for that phrase for free.
Maybe the search optimizer on Martha’s Apprentice can help these people out. It’s all so simple once you change your line of thinking.
Here are some other sites relating to The Apprentice:
The Apprentice > Season 4 in the Yahoo! Directory
The Apprentice Rules | Donald Trump + Martha Stewart NBC TV Shows
Open Directory – Arts: Television: Programs: Reality-Based: Apprentice, The