Coming up with an ad campaing on short notice. With the people involved, it should be easy. I was impressed with the quality of what they showed, but that could be due to the facilities available to the contestants.
First question: why didn’t they show the women’s commercial? In keeping with the phallic theme did NBC consider it too racy for primetime?
Team Protege: Sorry, but Omorosa has got to go. She picks a fight with a different woman each week, and seems to contibute nothing but negative comments. Add in what appears to be hypersensitivity about race and she looks more like a risk-avoider than a risk-taker.
All of the other women seemed to work together well, and I like that they “rolled the dice” with the ad campaign. No guts, no glory.
Versacorp: I still hate the name. Compumegahyperglobalnet.com. Ugh.
When they picked Jason as their leader I thought they had it in the bag. A guy who worked in advertising? Score! And he begins by making the stupidest move imaginable: NOT meeting with the client! When your entire team is telling you to meet with the client, it’s not the time to assert your leadership and say “My decision stands”. But he did, and it cost him. Boy, did it cost him.
Sam the annoying human hummingbird managed to escape the boardroom unscathed again. How many times can he go in there and still survive? And what exactly did he do this time other than sleep and complain?
Overall question: how many people can a team lose before the disparity in team size makes it unfair? With two people gone the guys will be hurting next time (and from the preview it looks like they nominate Sam as the leader, hurting them even more).
My prediction for the sleeper that goes far: Bowie Hogg!!!
I thought the guys had a good commercial, but it was pretty generic. I was kind of put off by the women’s direct mail campaign, but I guess it was about the guts.
I think maybe Omorosa gets a bad shake. I think she is just playing up something that’s not there. I thought her race remarks were irritating, and as a black woman I thought she lost her mind on that one. Yet at the same time, I feel like they are just going to have it out for her no matter what. She brought it on herself though.
Sam is so annoying. However, he’s smart. He obviously knows that reality T.V. is just about getting at people, making them watch you whether the attention is good or bad. That may be what Omorosa is doing. Trump is going to keep Sam, because he’s good T.V. However, the team is trying to do him in by making him team leader. If they fail, they hope that he’ll go.
Sam has got to be the most annoying reality show contestant since… well, whatever the last reality show was. On the one hand I really wanted him gone tonight (and he deserves it), but I figured he’s the kind of character the producers want to stick around as much as possible. Jason made a big mistake though, and got Sam off the hook. Actually Jason made two mistakes… the second one was taking Nick to the boardroom. I don’t know who would have been a better choice, but he chose possibly the worst one (after Nick had built Jason up in front of Trump, Trump saw Jason’s pick as disloyal).
Although I want the guys to win one now, I’d hate to see them win with Sam as the project manager – that will only encourage him!
And I agree about Omarosa – she seems to go out of her way to alienate as many of her teammates as she can. If you want to succeed in business, you have to learn to get people to work with you, not against you.
The hypersensitive Omorosa (I noticed you bolded it in black font… are you a racist?) is beyond annoying. Was she honestly saying that someone saying “that’s the pot calling the kettle black” was a racist comment? This is the kind of crap that has come out of the political correctness movement. She’s convinced she’s a “victim” by screaming “racism” at every turn. Someone needs to point out to her that an asshole is an asshole. It doesn’t matter what the color of your skin happens to be.
As for Sam… I think he’s probably good for ratings, so he’ll be there for a while. Yes, Jason made a bad decision, and I have no problem seeing him go. But Sam should have been booted week 1.
I think the reason Jason picked Nick was because he figured that Trump was going to fire Sam and so it didn’t really matter all that much who he picked as the number 2 guy. That strategy will most likely need to be used again and if it is successful (which it was not this time) it will create some very interesting dynamics in the project that follows.
As far as Omarosa goes, I have to imagine they are picking the most sensational moments and playing up the race factor. I’ll never understand why all these reality shows seem to always have so few minorities in them. The Apprentice had thousands of applicants and they could only find one black man who was qualified?
After thinking about this I think that Sam will be with us for a while. He’s the guy you love to hate, and he has to stick around for at least the first half of the show. If the guys win next week then he’s safe (and can they really lose three times in a row?).
And I agree that Nick was picked for the boardroom because Sam looked like the surefire bootee. But I liked that Trump told Nick that he didn’t have to worry about being fired. Relax, kid, it’s down to these two guys next to you!
The women did not produce a commercial. They decided to go with print ads and a direct mail campaign.
The men’s campaign was technically well done but totally generic. It was the type of ad which fills space in the magazines but which no one reads. They made a good workmanlike presentation but they made their fatal mistake by not meeting with the client. Sam may have fallen asleep on the floor, but the campaign would have failed even if he had raced around like a caffeine-crazed weasel. They fired the right culprit.
The women. I don’t know. It would have been nice if Omarosa had acknowledged that the campaign worked even if she didn’t like the idea. I thought she was going to kill someone when she wasn’t allowed to go visit the client. The other women don’t seem to be willing to allow her to be the Queen Bee; I expect her to stay around for a long while since she adds conflict to the girl scout troop. (Heidi scares me. She is much too old to be wearing hooker makeup.)
Though I might’ve blurted it out myself, the fact is, that’s exactly the kind of innocuous comment you don’t want to supply someone like Omarosa with, who at the first sign of losing the upper hand in an arguement will pull the racist crap on you. It tells me she was unable to meet the other chick (I forget her name, the headstrong Italian one) on the same intellectual playing field, and so had to fall back on being the victimized minority in a plane full of white women.
This should be called the Big Brother Gambit–nominate someone you actually like along with the person actually you want gone, with the hope that it will force the vote the way you want it to.
It never works on Big Brother, either.
Further, I think it’s an especially lousy strategy on this show. Here we see the team leader suggesting to Trump that one of the good people should be considered for being fired! I don’t know much about business, but I suggest that’s not a good move and Trump recognizes that.
I’m not sure if I missed it or if it was never stated – what was Jason’s rationale for not meeting the client? “Waste of time”? I’m not a business type but it’s obvious to me that meeting the client would be step one in such a project.
The women’s campaign was borderline offensive – but definitely eye-grabbing. They deserved the win; they were clearly the team that was willing to try something different.
If I understood his reasoning correctly, it boiled down to the fact that they were a man short; he listed who had which assignments and concluded “that’s everybody, now who do they expect me to send to meet the client?” . IMHO, meeting the client should have been A-1 priority(as it was for the women).
It makes you wonder, what the men would have come up with, had they actually gone to meet the client, and found out they were looking for something edgy, and not-so-safe?
Chris W
PS Does anyone know of a black “reality show” participant that has NOT pulled the “race card”? It seems the producers of these shows consistently get blacks(people of color, etc.) who are lazy, unmotivated, divisive crybabies. I KNOW most of the blacks I have known as friends are positive thinking, highly motivated people. Do the producers only pick these types of individuals? Or are well-educated, motivated blacks simply smart enough NOT to apply to these shows?
Not all black reality show contestants have made an issue of race, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head that have really come off well on TV. Of course you could say the same of most of the white contestants as well.
On the other hand, Kwame seems pretty competent right now. He’s been contributing to the projects, acting professionally, and not pissing everyone else off (a la Sam). Isn’t he the one with the Harvard MBA or something too? A Harvard MBA may be overrated, but they don’t hand them out to slackers, either.
Jason had no good excuse to back up his claim that they don’t need to meet with the client. It was just bad.
However, I am mad he got the boot as I wanted Sam gone so bad.
Trump and his 2 right hands cracked me up when they said “they all hate you” Sam " no I don’t think they hate me" “oh yes, they do!”.
I don’t even love to hate Sam, I just plain can not stand him, he is such a kiss ass I want to puch him in the face.
The black lady is an idiot, black or not. She is narcisist and pretentious.
Mrs Gargoyle and I were astounded at Sam’s falling asleep, but for different reasons. We suspect that there is something going on behind the scenes that isn’t being shown.
When Sam put his head down, Mrs G right off the bat said “He’s got a sleep disorder.”
“Pshaw,” I said. “He’s just having a coffee crash”
“You doubt a narcoleptic?” replies Mrs G, her being diagnosed as such.
Then Sam crawls into a corner on the floor and fades away.
Mrs G then gets to use one of her renowned smirk/eyebrow “I told you so ™” combos.
It could possibly be something like a diabetic reaction also. People just don’t curl up in a ball on the floor on national TV!
What amazed me even further was when Jason and the other guy just smiled and carried on. I would have been over checking for medic-alert bracelets on Sam, that just isn’t normal.
I’m wondering if Big Don and the boardroom knew something that we didn’t, possibly being sensitive to the legal/social ramifications of firing someone because of a disorder or disability?
Interesting speculation. However – it seems to me that one of the steps of the screening process would be a physical, just as a matter of common-sense CYA on the part of the producers. Although this show isn’t as physically gruelling as, say, “Survivor,” the producers would want to make sure there were no ugly surprises of a medical nature. I can’t believe they would allow in someone with narcolepsy – or that they would allow a contestant to be endangered by the decision of his or her teammates to not check for a medic-alert bracelet (or signs of life, or whatever), in this kind of situation.
I think Jason might have been able to save himself if he’d done two things:
• Admit right off the bat that not meeting the client was a bad call. Don’t try to excuse it, don’t hem and haw. Admit you screwed up, and say you’ve learned from the mistake.
• Come up with a reason – any reason, no matter how shaky – to nominate Nick, beyond “someone had to be nominated.” Duh. Why him? Jason probably should’ve nominated Kwame and said that even though Kwame did a good job, he was the main presenter to the client, and his presentation was unsuccessful. Stress that Sam was a worse performer, and that Kwame wouldn’t be on the chopping block if a second person didn’t have to be nominated.
But it’s not like Trump fired the wrong guy.
Also, I’m not wild about Omarosa, but Ereka (or whotever her nemesis is) also needs to shut the hell up. It’s a lost cause, dear. The two of them are in a hole and using shovels to throw dirt at each other.
Neither group came up with much of a big idea, which I think is why the women’s more stylish (and classier, in a Trumpian sense) presentation ended up winning. I’m sorry to break it to Tammy, but phallic symbols are hardly groundbreaking advertising work – they’re first-year ad student work. But their photographer made the photos look like Georgia O’Keefe outtakes, so good on them. The men’s tagline was better, but they didn’t do anything with it, and produced ads that looked like ads – exactly what they were told not to do.
Finally, I have to repeat: I hate everyone on this show. Everyone who’s had a chance to make an impression, anyway.
Yep. This might’ve saved him, as it saved Troy last week. Trump apparently appreciates the sincere mea culpa.
I will cite Troy, again. He is easily the most likable of the whole squawking bunch… though I also remember a very sweet, down-home type chickie who kind of faded into the background after the intros last week. She must feel a bit out of place there on Team Vagina Dentata.