I confess: I’m an avid fan of the Apprentice. For those of you who don’t know about the programme, it’s a reality TV show where prespective candidates are asked to perform various tasks to determine their suitability to work for one of Alan Sugar’s companies. At the onset of the series, individuals are grouped into two teams and given a different task each week that is supposed to test different aspects of business life – elements like selling, purchasing, man-mangement, presenting and negotiating.
This week’s task was all about marketing: the teams were given a new cereal targeted at children and asked to develop a brand identity, the packaging and a 30 second TV Commercial in two days. Which they duly did. Cue much mirth and merriment about the ridiculous ideas, the poor packaging, infighting and poorly executed TVCs.
My issue is simple. The apprentices should have gone so much further: two days is plenty of time to develop a sophisticated campaign which should include (at the very least) an approach to introducing the product to the market, differing channel strategies, promotional ideas and a variety of channel executions. Despite one team being led by a “experienced marketeer” and the target audience being kids and mums, we saw not one digital execution, heard no suggestion of on-pack promotions and saw no thought into how the product would actually be released to the market.
Now I know that advertising to children is a sensitive issue and merits careful thought and I’m also aware that the programme istelf is heavily edited to make for engaging viewing, but this is an activity that candidates are asked to work on every year and since the programme’s inception, I haven’t heard any sniff of using digital media to achieve the task.
Use digital ‘change agents’ have had to deal with the advertising bias towards television since we had the ‘audactity’ to suggest that perhaps a brief could be met without a shoot in the Maldives. Given the numerous studies into channel erosion and the increasing lack of relevance of the TVC for particular audiences, it would be nice to see clients like SrAlan recognising that perhaps, after almost 20 years, it is worth considering an alternative to the TVC.
It doesn’t take much thought to include. I mean, even the BBC programme site has games, a blog, a Facebook page, Forums, embedded videos and links to other related sites.
Hrmph