It hasn't gone viral....it has gone awry....

For the past 3 weeks of the Apprentice, I have experienced a wide range of emotions – rage, frustration, resignation (that it’s just entertainment) and having watched episode 4 I now curiously feel pity for them.

This week it was about creating a video for You Tube with the plan to make it enticing enough to go viral.  Things didn’t get off to a great start when shortly after proclaiming it was a “21^st century” task, Lord Sugar was referring to one of the candidates as “the internet man”.  I honestly thought I had travelled back in a time machine to 1986 and doing an online video was some sort of novelty.

Both teams instantly decided on humour as the basis for their videos.  Team Tenacity produced Fat Daddy Fitness Hell, featuring vaguely podgy Felipe intentionally failing to imitate exercise routines. Team Summit’s offering was Dare to Dine, which saw “comedian” James doing such farcical things as creating vampire fangs out of dough and waving rubber chickens around.  It looked like something out of the Muppets.

I feel pity as this wasn’t about 21^st century digital marketing.  Two rooms of 20-somethings trying to figure out what would be funny was about as far away from marketing as was possible to be – digital or otherwise.  There was no direction, no objectives, no strategy and so the tactics were always going to be off beam.  This was perfectly illustrated by Team Summit’s time in front of a potential hosting client.  They’d apparently targeted “18-30” but the client clearly thought they meant months, so a spell on the naughty step was clearly in order.

The only thing that made it 21^st century was the fact that Lord Sugar had to add in some reality TV drama by firing not 1, not 2 but all 3 “dead wood” (his words not mine) Tenacity candidates who were brought back into the boardroom for the final drubbing after they lost the task.  All hope is gone for me now and I fear I will add boredom to the above list if they’re not careful. 

Steven “hissy fits” Ugoalah and Sarah “short skirts” Dales (Apprentice’s authentic panto villain) provided the entertainment.  Ella-Jade Britton was the third casualty last night.  Her business idea for Lord Sugar was TV productions apparently although she blankly stated “I don’t have experience in YouTube,”  Her fate was also sealed when her team had even failed in the most basic of tasks of adding titles and descriptions to the videos so that people can actually find and share them.  She was a worthy casualty for that alone and I would have pressed the delete button too.