The Apprentice 2016 Week 5

Crowdfunding was the name of the game in this week’s Apprentice task with both teams having to come up with their own rewards based crowdfunding campaign for cycling equipment, organise a live event, create a crowdfunding page and then try and get as many hits as they can, and also pitch to major cycling retailers. Another typical day in Apprenticeland methinks.

The teams were shuffled up and project managers installed with JD and Samuel taking up the batons this week. Both teams then met up with some entrepreneurs, who had come up with some new ideas.

The ideas that were the most popular amongst both teams were a gilet which lights up invented by a woman whose husband was knocked down on his way to work and the other was a pair of bone conduction headphones, both of which were very health and safety conscious.

Titans chose the gilets and Nebula the headphones and went on their way to begin their campaign. The sub teams spoke to the entrepreneurs about what they could offer to potential customers as rewards but Nebula totally forgot about the rewards option and was more interested in the costs and what offers they offer the customers to entice them.

This did not go unnoticed by their entrepreneur who must have thought that they were a pack of jokers who didn’t know what they were talking about.

It was the entrepreneur who basically guided them as to what they can offer and in the end they only had one reward for a certain pledge. Titans were a bit more pro-active in their approach to their entrepreneur and got several exclusive deals for their pledges.

Once the deals were on the table the teams split into two and one sorted out the crowfunding page and the other people worked on the press stunt to advertise their product.

One of the teams chooses to use a loud gospel choir to advertise their product and the other team went for a mine scene of a hit and run event to advertise their product.

I am not sure which one was worse and which one was the most inappropriate especially for the woman who invented the gilet as this invention was actually inspired by own her own husband being injured in an accident which might have been a bit too close to home for her.

The gospel choir stunt was a bit classier than the other stunt but might have made less of an impact than people pretending to ride imaginary bicycles around Waterloo station.

Not that I am saying that there if often an impromptu gospel choir breaking out at random intervals in the capital often enough for it not to really make people look up from whatever they were doing at the time, but you never know.

Both stunts were filmed to go on the website but Rebecca made a bit of a pigs ear of her filming, and didn’t actually catch any of the actual stunt, or at least not that you would notice. Once all of that was done both websites went live and they waited for the pledges to roll in, or at least they hoped that they would.

The following day both teams were given a group of industry specialists to try and hawk their product with which really didn’t go down that well as one of the teams tried to tell a large retailer that they would get the same discount as a large retailer no matter how large and order that they excepted, which went down like a lead balloon as expected.

It was also on the second day that Claude mentioned to Titans that they had spelt the world Gilet wrong on the website, and that the word that they used instead Gillet actually meant a woman of ill repute which made me laugh out loud. I mean why in the hell didn’t they check the spelling before they made the website live, surely that would have been the obvious thing to do, but not to the Apprentice candidates who are so far up their own arses with their belief in themselves that they can never put a foot wrong, until they are yanked down to Earth in the boardroom.

In this episode despite having the far better product Nebula managed to lose the task mostly because they had not bothered with any rewards for their product and JD has a lot to answer for which he took in his stride and took the lion’s share of the blame.

It might have been easier to fire him there and then but Lord Sugar still made him bring people back into the boardroom but that was to no avail as it was JD who was fired mostly because he was so laid back that he was virtually horizontal and he basically let his team run riot and didn’t make sure that the sub team was doing what it was supposed to do.

In the end I think JD was a little bit too nice for this process and not prepared to sell his own grandmother to the highest bidder like the majority of these candidates would do without blinking an eye.