Agree. The whole decision was unsatisfactory imo.

Hasta la vista gravy was a good line anyway

Both ads were dire, but since when has that ever stopped an advert making it to the screen? There was an appalling one last year, for an oven cleaner, which was insulting to men and came across as very amateurish.

As long as it fills the gaps in Coronation Street or X Factor, anything will do.

Must admit I thought the wrong team won too. The only thing they did differently was take the focus group comments about colour of the product to heart - and that was the one thing Sandeesh appears to have forgotten to pass on from their focus group (she said in the boardroom that their focus group had said yellow).

Both were absolutely awful though and I think it would have been fairer all round to have just declared it a draw and pulled in both PMs and one team member and fired one out of those as suggested ^^^ up there

Though the advert was dire, I did think that the Octopus design and name was quite good (Lord Sugar was impressed with it).

Neither thing can be said from the other team's effort.

One of the problems was though, they wanted to shoe-horn the line into the ad, even though the focus should have been on the elimination of germs (Germ O Nator, doh), NOT the removal of stains. The design of the packaging was appalling, but to me, the lack of focus of the message was the weakest link.

I think I could have come up with a better bottle design than that weed-killer style bottle.

It was lemon scented so it should have been a yellow(ish) bottle. The Germ-o-nator name wasn't too bad but shouldn't have had anything to do with the film. A cartoon picture of a germ being in cross hairs may have been better on the label with a strapline Terminates those germs. Also the advert should have been link to Stu-bags voice-over.

In fact thats probably still appalling but would probably have won against the other carp.

Germ-o-nator couldn't have won because it had a child handling it

The problem was the Germinator bottle just screamed "Motor Oil" - even more than the "Drip-Drop" water bottle did on kiddies Apprentice earlier this year.
What that means is that you could have the best ad ever, but at the point the customer is actually going to put the product in their basket they will just think "no - that's not cleaner, its motor oil" and pick up some Cillit Bang! instead.

Was having brekky this morning, and chanced to glance at my own kitchen cleaning bottles.

One of them is a black and red bottle.

It's 'Sainburys Sink Unblocker', and on the red label on the front, it proudly announces 'Kills all germs'.

Maybe Lord Sugar never actually does any cleaning himself, and is just a bit out of touch with modern marketing.

Germ-o-nator was clearly the most interesting brand concept, but they cocked it up with the packaging and the TV ad (particularly the use of the child). The radio ad was great, yet no one seemed to mention that in the boardroom.

Octo-Clean was an uninspired brand and the TV ad was dire. So iMHO Germ-o-nator should have won.

I'm sure I've seen cleaning products in a black bottle with a more 'harsh' design. Not as crude as Germonater but going for a non-pastel colour is not automatically wrong, IMHO.


The Octoclean commercial was verging on on obscene, I thought but Germonator just had more things wrong with it.

The whole point of a task such as this, where the 'winner' is decided not on sales but on an arbitary value judgement is that it gives the chance for Lord Sugar tyo get rid of weaker candidates. There's no doubt that Alex's team contained far more candidates that had been deemed as not final material. The only real decision to be made was if one or two would go - and I think had Laura been chosen it wouldn't have saved Alex, it would just have meant two going. I think Sandeesh is only being saved so that if/when one of his preferred candidates cocks up, he can get rid of her using the excuse she contributes little.

It's not just you but the kid brandishing not one but TWO cleaning sprays was an automatic fail.

You might as well advertise Tesco by having a coupla kids pulling the Christmas sherry off the shelves and into the trolley while Mum (or whoever, I'm SO PC!) yaks to a sales assistant.

The Octopus ad was cheesy, sexist and dated - however, it did show the name/product and it showed all the types of surfaces it cleaned. The product was better designed, named and the tag-line concept was good

Germ-o-nator - their ad showed a kid using it when it says on the bottle to keep out of their reach, and the ad showing a man cleaning up stains didn't match the product (anti-baterial cleaner). I agree that the Germ-o-nator looked like something I'd keep in my shed as some kind of bug-poison or something. There was no overall cohesive concept. The only thing really going for it was its name, which is more stronger and more inspirational.

The Octopus wasn't great, but it ticked more boxes.

In this task, unlike most if not all of the others so far, there was no objective criterion for winning or losing, no £££ of orders won or sales made. It was all Alan Sugar's choice, "advised" by the marketing company they pitched to.

So once he was informed that both concepts were equally dire, he could pick whichever team as loser who had, overall, the likeliest candidates for an imminent chop.

He even let the cat out of the bag, while the team were still all in the boardroom, that he was not looking favourably on Laura and Alex based on recent performances. When Alex failed to take this hint and brought in Sandeesh, his fate was sealed.

It's called strategic thinking, and is one reason why Sugar has risen from a humble background to riches and the House of Lords, and we haven't.

The thing to remember is this task is designed to fail. Look at the tv adverts. How much do they cost to make? They're filmed in someone's home and they look like they cost about fifty quid to make. The makers of The Apprentice don't invest in the adverts, it's just amateur hour and set up to make the candidates look awful. Had they been given a bigger budget and more time, who knows, perhaps the adverts would look better. But the whole thing is set up to make the candidates and their products look crap!

Every year on this task one of the candidates thinks they are Speilberg and another De Niro. What LudAl looks for on this is the team that understood the concept better, which Christopher's team did

Yep - if he'd called the product Blitz as they were saying on Your're Fired it would be just as easy to hammer him and ask him why would he expect anyone to buy a product whose name is associated with the death of thousands of civilians in the UK in World War 2.

I also thought it was a wrong decision.it would have been much fairer to ask both pm back and have it out with both of them.
Blitz, well I am not British, but still my first thought was of the London blitz.
The germinator idea was good even lo said so, but they lack detail management.
The other one was just plain and simply offensive.

Pretty much reminds me of a card trick that no matter what card is chosen, it's going to be to the trickster's advantage.

SA got in front of him whom he wanted eliminated out of a chosen few, that were the best out of the batch of his chosen few....i.e. the other team.

But the fact that he seemed to be baying for Laura's blood, was either genuine or immacutely staged.

And as for the other team.......FFS, they should have been failed for taking women back to the suffragette era for that alone.

So I go back to my card trick......

True, but then so was claiming that your cleaner cleaned quicker, by a factor of 4, than anything else.Thats a legal minefield.

His Lordship didn't actually major on the bleached child argument , it was just mentioned. He seemed more interested in the ad confusing germs and dirt - which wasn't actually that significant as it did both.

We never did find out where the picture came from on the germanator bottle or why they ended up with a boy actor did we? I am not clear who ordered a boy germanator or who provided the bottle picture - perhaps they should have gone or perhaps they werepicked by someoen who was not even one of the candidates.

Alex's team is easily the worst team. They have had that team in the boardroom so many times now, and I lose count of how many times Sandeesh has been in the boardroom. All the best candidates are in the one team and all the rubbish ones are in another. To be fair though, the advertising task is never executed that well on any series of the Apprentice. Remember Pants Man?

I was disappointed with Christopher this week though. I was expecting more from him. I think it is between Stella and Liz now for the final with Jamie or Joanna joining them in the finals.

So what did Stella and Liz do that made them so spectacular this week? In fact, had it been their team in the boardroom, then Stella could have been in trouble, since she was the biggest advocate behind the ad and the theme that 'women should be banished to the kitchen'.

Both adds were dire, the losing team lost, because, the bottle was the wrong colour[Kitchen cleaners are mainly pastel coloured, the bottle looked like a Car cleaner].

Using a Child to handle the cleaner. Cleaners/Bleach, are one of the things you tell Children never to touch, & yet they ignored that.

Lastly, the name, the losing team forgot, that it was meant to be a Kitchen Cleaner, getting rid of grease & stains not solely, getting rid of germs.

Wasn't there a similar task on the US Apprentice, were both teams made a mess of an advert, & the task was declared a draw, & both teams faced the Boardroom, which probably have been the the best outcome here?