One of Tara’s big mistakes, other than playing Messiah to Harlem, was not having played the damn videogame enough. The whole idea is to know your product (and market) intimately. She should have devoted a good hour to playing it, possibly with a few home boys at her side.
Also, I think her team’s graffiti could have been a winner had they painted the videogame’s name in huge letters above the mural. Link the mural with the product, better. “Tear it up” is a pretty catchy tagline, IMO.
A last thought: several of the women on these teams are unusually shapely. I’m hoping the next segment finds them trying to earn money at a strip club. Just as long ass the girls tend bar.
Tara approached this task from the persepective of a real estate developer. She was obsessed with the mural being an integral part of the community, as if it were going to be a permanent structure. I think she would have been very good as Trump’s apprentice, since most of his business involve real estate development. However, for this particular task, it was much more important to focus on the actual game they are trying to market.
Of the 12 people on the teams, why wasn’t there someone insisting they spend time getting familiar with the game they are trying to advertise? And have the artist see the game, too. I don’t play video games, but I’ll bet that Sony has spent a ton of money on artists and graphic designers coming up with cool images to use in the game, and some of those should have been incorporated into the mural.
John and Craig summarized it best. John said that Tara was a stronger member of team, and Craig said that on this particular task, Tara was responsible for their failure.
I’m liking the season. The people who are getting fired deserve it (or they are at least justifiable). There seem to be some decent friendships forming. This cast seems much more about winning the game than pledging a sorrority.
A few random thoughts:
I loved that George cracked in this week about the appropriate use of hip hop and slang to promote a video game. George, when PONG was invented, you were already an old man!
Bren is fun to watch. Such happiness and humor. Notice that while Alex was trying to put his arm around one of the models, Bren had four WILLING volunteers. He is right. The bowtie is an effective weapon. I have a friend who is a prosecutor who looks a lot like Bren and I have been trying to sell him on bowties.
Craig owned that boardroom didn’t he? Even the Audrey husband as a submissive probably hit the target with Trump the Misogynist. But he killed her with the “I” ownership of the idea. The last time someone took presentation credit, Cafe Society errupted in a flame war that bled into this season. I foresee no such controversy this time!
I loved John’s matter of fact response that he too knew there were other scenes. Most people would have kept quiet. He was straight forward. He even admitted that he would have gone the same way she did. Then when asked, he honsetly said Tara was the better candidate. Balls!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the teams play the game? I recall seeing someone actually playing the game with team members standing behind him. I want to say it was John, but that could just be me fantasizing about him playing with buttons and stuff.
When Tara started in on the “My, I, Me” schtick, I knew she was gone. I would like to interject some witty comment about how her dismissal must have raised her eyebrows, but considering she doesn’t have any eyebrows, I am at a loss. Yes, that is petty, but just one of those things that I notice. People, by and large, have eyebrows. Unless they were in a sad tweezer attack.
The key difference was that while Alex knew he didn’t know, Tara didn’t know that she didn’t know, i.e. about what the game was about and what it’s appeal was. Alex looked confused at first, and he was, and he recognizd and figured out why: He didn’t know the game. So he asked people who did and it worked. Tara also didn’t know the game, butdecided that wasn’t important and rolled ahead with her concept which was totally wrong. AUdrey tried to tell her, she owned it, as Craig said and she deserved the firing.
I did not understand her comments in the cab, something about she shouldn’t have to give direction to all the team members, etc. She may have a point but it had nothing to do with why she failed on the task.
When Alex crossed the street (NICE move) to talk to the Harlem guys, I was so afraid he was going to channel Clark Griswald from Vacation. (“Yo, Holmes! What it is!?”) He handled it well. He was out of his element and he knew it. He went to the experts and those experts won him a big week.
I was afraid there was going to be some racially sensitive moments last night. Fortunately, there were not any.
But I must ask this question: do you think people were not more willing to challenge Tara on her idea regarding Harlem revitalization because they didn’t want to be edited as the “racist”?
This is just the best explanation of WHY Tara got the boot! Well done, Gangster Octopus! We learned from Tara that if you’re going to glom onto a project and make it your own, you damn well better win. Otherwise, you’re toast.
And I didn’t pay any attention to what she said in the cab. It just didn’t matter any more.
“Balls” can make you or break you in the boardroom, and Trump is really inconsistent on this point. One minute he praises ballsiness, the next he’s raking you over the coals.
In light of past events, John’s frank admission can also be seen as reckless and it certainly earned him a trip to the boardroom. He knew Tara was looking for a scapegoat. Saying anything was a mistake, knowing she would twist it to her benefit. Fortunately for him, Tara’s My Way or the Highway approach guaranteed that she would be either 100 percent genius or 100 percent failure, with no middle ground. But when the vision is wrong, problems with execution are secondary.
She should have played the game and patterned a griffiti theme directly from it. That’s what Sony wanted.
I disagree with your assessment of John’s risky move, Carnac.
But they did. In the opening sessions, there was a lot of effort to drag Tara away from Harlem revitalization. Didn’t Audrey mention the deserts in the game? Tara played the race card after being challenged by her team members, and maybe they conceded at that point, but they made their best effort.
Tara strikes me as someone who’s never received negative criticism. She’s smart and confident and probably hasn’t failed that much before. Although the failure was definitely hers, I do think her team could have worked harder shaping the vision. I don’t think she would have shot anyone’s suggestions down (except if they had come from Audrey, who she clearly didn’t like).
Her comment about losing “street cred” was hilarious, and the fact that she was totally serious made it even funnier. Tara doesn’t strike me from “Tara from the block”, “Round the way girl”, or anything like that. She probably grew up in the suburbs. She had put racial significance to her position when it wasn’t needed or expected.
Craig was kinda annoying to me. He’s seems like a smart, mature kinda guy, but how come when he was talking to Audrey and then to Tara, he sounded like a reject from the Junkyard Gang? It wasn’t professional. I probably wouldn’t listen to him either, if I had been Audrey.
Audrey is too rough around the edges for my liking.
Chris almost had a “moment” during one of those interviews when he was talking about Tara taking all the credit. I was sitting on the edge of the couch waiting for the bomb to go off, but it didn’t.
I liked Net Worth’s billboard better than Magna, even though it was a “loser”. I know I’m not in the demographic the product was targeting, but I would have been totally turned off by a fist with money all up in my face. IMHO, that was much more stereotypical than Net Worth’s board.
I just watched a tape of the episode (stupid cable going out last night–grrr!) and Tara reminded me of our new hires. They come into our group (marketing) and every one of them has a hard time working with our agency to develop ads that sell the product. They want to do fun or artsy ads. The kind of ads they can proudly tell their friends “I worked on that one.” None of them like the conservative (sort of stodgy) ads our company does. At some point, each and every one will come in and say “my friend so-and-so complained that our ads are dull.”
However, our dull ads work to sell our (rather conservative and sort of stodgy) product to our (rather conservative and sort of stodgy) target audience. It’s a really difficult concept for our new hires to grasp: the ads don’t have to “wow” the audience; they just have to sell the product.
Now with this product, they could do a “wow” ad. In fact, they probably should do a “wow” ad. However, it’s still got to sell the product. I really liked Tara’s billboard. However, I could see that it didn’t focus enough on the product and not at all on the sell. It wasn’t so much the location featured. It was more that the product name and other information was buried (if it was included at all). I agree that the fist in Magna’s ad was pretty stereotypical and cliche. However, it did get that “PS2” out there front and center. Likewise, it was (as others have mentioned) and obvious ad and not artwork.
I really liked that they brought in focus groups to evaluate the billboards rather than having someone like Donny Deutsche or other execs pick the winner based solely on their own thoughts. With the focus groups, they could ask the important questions of their target audience like “would this get you to buy the product.” Too often people who aren’t making the buy decision get caught up in irrelevant issues like “this ad is really funny; I love it.” I mentioned that our new hires have trouble understanding that the ad has to sell above everything. However, it’s something that even veterans struggle with at times. I’ve fallen in love with an ad only to have it played to focus groups and find that, while they love the ad, they won’t buy anything off of it.
That was what I was asking, really. I know there was some disagreement at first, but Tara seemed to make the situation about being black and not being black (as you say “played the race card.”).
After that, I don’t think it was easy to challenge her.
