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January 20, 2004
The Apprentice Episode 2: Jason
So last week was Episode 2, still men against women. Jason Curis, the affable slum lord hunk was the men's team captain. Tammy Lee, the Seattle whiner during the first show as appointed Women's team captain in part because she thought she could do such a better job. The task was to develop a new marketing campaign for NetJets. It was not as obvious from the get-go which team had the advantage here.
Again, the women started out in turmoil and the men went right on task. Each team got a photographer, video person and some graphic design tallent to help produce their ideas and pitch for the CEO of NetJets. I thought Tammy Lee would be a disaster as a team leader and the start looked that way. She was so impressed with their ability to use sex to sell lemonaide that she wanted to take that path as well with the jets. So she designed a campaign that photographed the aircraft in all sorts of ways that were falic and sexual. One picture of the engine hole was subtitled, Can you fit in? Another has a middle aged businessman with a sexy flight attendant sitting behind and above him on the plane wing with "Get on top" as the caption. When the girls walked into pitch the deal, they also went with flight attendant outfits and lots of leg. Their idea was that the CEO would love it or hate it, but either way it was a BIG idea. When they finished I thought they had made fools out of themselves and acted like silly little girls. The CEO was noticable uncomfortable with all the sex and hated their idea to use direct mail.
The men went with a much tamer campaign. It showed a sucessful businessman getting great service and avoiding the delays of commercial flights. Very straight forward value and benefit sale. They came in in suits. After they pitched, I said "they nailed it". It was a much more practical campaign. I would have chosen the men.
Again I was wrong. The CEO of NetJets summed it up very well: The men were steak and the women were sizzle. When you buy an ad agency, you buy the people. You want to buy sizzle. You can always tone down the sizzle, it is hard to sex up steak to sizzle. He chose the women. He is obviously right.
So the women go back to the suite and the men back to the board room. Again Donald asks everyone to rat on everyone else. Everyone hated Sam again for going to sleep during a task and not even completing it. Jason the team manager was there as well for failure to meet with the client before the pitch. Those two had obvious complicity in the failure. Nick Warnock was thrown in there by Jason just because they needed three. Donald realized immediately that Nick didn't really need to be there. So it was between Jason and Sam. I though Sam would go this time for sure. But old Donald threw out Jason. The reason was that Jason made a bad judgement in not going to see the client before the pitch. That was an active decision to do something stupid. Now Sam fell asleep and may not have contributed, but he did not do anything really wrong or destructive to the cause while Jason did. Again the right decision, with me missing the mark. Well there is always this week.
Posted by Martin at January 20, 2004 1:41 PM
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Comments
The women's leader that week was Amy (not Tammy Lee)
Posted by: Anonymous at February 14, 2004 1:25 PM
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