Did anyone else find it really funny when that geek girl was dancing in the 'Vanity' advert!! I nearly fell off my sofa!!! lol

Did anyone else find it really funny too?

Looks like it was just me then!!!

It might interest you to know that she was in Big Brother a few years ago - her name is Emily Parr, the girl who got booted out for using the N word!

I agree she played the part really well! The concept sounded awful, but it actually was a pretty good advert!

I thought she was hilarious.


Was that Emily? She of the Bumspace? Well I never.

I thought it was rubbish, I'm afraid. I don't blame any of the cast; they did what they could with it. The concept was just awful and the only thing that could have made it less funny was if they'd put Ricky Gervais in it.

I thought it was hilarous, but in a *bad* way ...... so awful it becomes hilarious!

Did laugh, though !!!!

Was basically a reversal of a lynx advert. Pretty sure they've done one where some nice looking ladies get up and dance with the geeky looking guy because he's used some lynx.

So basically seen it before with a slightly higher production quality and the genders reversed.

Terrible advert, I can't believe Sugar blamed the failure on the packaging when THAT was their ad.

Either Sugar knew from the start that he was getting rid of Gbemi so he would throw the blame at the part she was responsible for or,
Sugar did throw blame at the ad and the packaging, but time constraints left his ad criticism on the cutting room floor.

ETA - I thought the ad quite fun, if a little cheezy. But as far as shifting deodorant is concerned, it was completely useless.

LS said that both ads were the best he'd ever seen on The Apprentice, but I suppose that's not saying much.

In fairness, Lord Sugar liked Cat-Size more than EveryDog - and then, after explaining that it was a very close call and both ads were quite well-made, proceeded to chew the candidates out for the next fifteen minutes before firing two of the ad's producers. I wouldn't just take his verdict on adverts with a pinch of salt, I'd actively disregard anything he has to say about them.

Also, I'm gonna point out that when I say Lord Sugar liked Cat-Size more than EveryDog, I really just mean the advertising campaigns.

He never said which one was tastier.

I thought the advert was pretty good, actually. Poorly filmed and edited, but the idea was a good one, Emily was very funny in it, and the slogan "change your smell, not yourself" was, I think, fantastic. The problem was that the advert had nothing whatsoever to do with the name, the packaging, or the concept of the deodorant. Had they stated off with the idea of giving people the confidence to be themselves and made everything tie in to that theme, then I think they'd have walked it.

I definitely think their advert was better than the other team's. If nothing else, the product was in every frame, whereas it was only at the beginning and the end of the other advert. People have lost this task before for not featuring the product on-screen enough.

Yep! Agree with every single word of this. Lord Sugar is absolutely awful at judging adverts.

You know what really got to me? Having a go at Harry's team for not having a storyboard, when Zara's ad didn't have a story. It was just a man dancing! The fact that they'd drawn a pretty picture of it didn't make a smidge of difference. Harry's ad had oodles more narrative than Zara's; it told a little story, it responded to a need, it showcased the product, it clearly identified the target market and it was a genuinely funny piece - funny enough that it'd be instantly memorable, rather than sink unnoticed into the fug of clichés that is every commercial break ever. But because Zara got her crayons out and depicted that story hers categorically lacked, that somehow made the advert better?

Absolute joke. I usually quite like Lord Sugar, but I'd sooner ask a complete stranger for their verdict on an advert than listen to a word he had to say about it. Where are his adverts, anyway? I've never seen an Amscreen commercial in my life. He's a business expert and he's done a bloody good job for himself in the field of flogging tut, but it's hard to take him seriously when he's hectoring Gbemi about how the (very, very good!) bottle design was "where the product went wrong." Particularly when Raw looked like a can of spray paint.

You're not about to tell me I was out of the room for that bit, are you? I knew I should've waited 'til it was on iPlayer.

Zara's ad was a bit dull, but not having a story was better than having such a cheesy awful cliche of a story. It'd be memorable all right, but for all the wrong reasons. Would people remembering "Oh, that's that product that was in that hideously bad advert" be a good thing. Gerald Ratner's joke about his products was memorable, and he went bust because of it.


The bottle design was like the ad; it stood out, as Gbemi claimed, but not in a good way.

I genuinely thought they both did stand out in a good way. The advert is gloriously silly and truly, sincerely, uproariously funny. People love to be a bit goofy, wish they had the confidence to be as kooky as they liked, and the actor in the ad really does sell it. She's brilliant; you instantly like her and her weird dancing - much, much more than you like the snooty, conventional girl. Don't get me wrong, I thought it looked horrendous when they were filming it; I was watching from between my fingers, thinking they'd already lost the task... and then the finished article came on and I absolutely loved it.

The message, which is clear throughout the advert, is that it'll give you the confidence to be yourself, which ties in with the mirror on the packaging (which does stand out!) and the packaging has a vintagey look which is very "in" right now - see also Florence + the Machine, Karen Gillan, Zara Brownless! It's feminine without being stereotypical... in fact, I'd say its defining trait is that it's very clearly aimed at actual teenage girls, rather than an advertising executive's caricature of a teenage girl.

The main thing I was getting at in the first post, though, is that even if you do believe that Raw was better than Vanity - which, while I completely disagree with it, I do respect - it's a bit churlish to snipe at Harry M for not putting his pen to a storyboard when the other team did nothing especially productive with theirs, either. That's all.

I feel like you saw a different advert from me. I saw a girl looking like someone's cliched idea of a geek girl (and looking like no-one has in the past thirty years). If they wanted us to see the other girl as snooty, it might have been an idea to show that; the idea seemed to be that she deserved a comeuppance simply for not being "geeky". It was so tired, lazy and stereotyped.

I might be wrong on the packaging; after all, I'm not a teenage girl. But they were pitching at advertising executives, so that was in a sense their real target, rather than actual teenage girls.

As for the storyboard, it wasn't the be-all-and-end-all of the task, nor was it made out to be, but it did speak of a rather disorganised approach which typified Harry's whole leadership style.

I disagree. I don't think having or not having a story matters at all. The story isn't what people would remember about the advert, it's the dancing. The dancing in the Vanity advert was memorably funny, the dancing in the Raw advert was something that's been seen a million times before. The Raw advert was no less clichéd or dated than the Vanity advert.

Vanity scored over Raw in two ways - it didn't take itself seriously and therefore managed to be funny, and it featured the product heavily. Raw took itself seriously and therefore didn't distinguish itself at all, and it barely featured the product.

I definitely stand by what I said above - had their campaign been coordinated, then the Vanity lot would have walked this as they had the better slogan and the better advert. The huge problem was that the advert and slogan had nothing to do with the branding.


Having memorably bad adverts has worked very well for any number of brands. GoCompare, Compare The Market, Cillit Bang, Ronseal. Adverts don't persuade people to buy the product because the advert is good, adverts work by informing people the product exists. As long as the advert is memorable, then it doesn't matter what people remember it for.


That wasn't an advert, that was the owner of a company telling you that what he sold was worthless. Slightly different.

And you can even sort-of get away with that in adverts. Remember the Marmite ones that showed how much some people hated it?

This is where we disagree, though. What was funny about the Vanity advert? Nothing that I could see. It was just annoying, and that was what it was memorable for.

It isn't true that Zara's ad barely featured the product. It was featured at least as heavily as in the Vanity ad and probably more.


I haven't seen the latter two ads you mention, but I wouldn't say that GoCompare or Compare The Market were memorably bad. They were silly, but it was inspired silliness. They were in fact very good ads. (Admittedly I came to hate the Compare The Market ad in the end, but that was because people using the catchphrase "Simples" got on my nerves)


I don't remember the marmite ad, though I'm very familiar with the adjective marmite as a description for something people either love or hate.

Here's a more relevant comparison than the Ratners one, then; the Yorkie bar "It's not for girls" campaign. I hated that so much I refused to buy the product any more. (Presumably other people didn't feel the same, since they kept using it, but it's still an example of how an ad can actually repel people, even if only one person)

This is a question of personal taste and there is no empirical answer. It's worth noting, though, that the ad execs were amused by it, as was a member of the opposing team.


That's simply not true. Zara's ad had the product at the beginning, then a whole lot of dancing, then the product at the end. The only frames of the Vanity advert that the product wasn't in was the couple of cutaways to the two boys and one girl who were watching the geek girl dance.


Again, this is personal taste. But you're in the minority, at least with GoCompare:

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/852789-g...-year-in-a-row
http://www.insiders-view.co.uk/gocom...o-hiding/00649


But you can't take personal experience and extrapolate that up to "true for everybody". If such adverts didn't work, then people wouldn't make them, and certainly wouldn't keep ploughing money in to them after they'd been shown not to work. Advertising costs far too much money for that.

Admittedly humour is personal, but usually you can see why something is meant to be funny, even if it doesn't tickle you personally. In this case, I don't see it. Why would this be funny?


Strictly yes, the product was on screen for longer in the Vanity ad if you're counting the time that the product is visible as an anonymous spraycan in someone's hand. That's not really featuring the product though. The time we saw the product in Zara's ad it was in close-up. How much time did we do so in the Vanity ad?


I can agree it would get annoying if you saw a lot of it, but nonetheless, it has a tune that sticks in your memory and no-one could say it doesn't mention the product. And it is an inspired idea.


Indeed, and I was very clear that I wasn't extrapolating; I recognised that other people clearly hadn't reacted to it the way I did. Nonetheless, it proves my point that an advert can repel as well as attract, and you would surely concede that it would be possible for an advert that was really ill-judged to annoy so many people that it's overall effect would be negative.

I don't think the concept was funny, I think the way Emily danced was funny. But seeing as she was part of the advert, the end result was that the advert was funny. At least as far as I and many of the people in the programme were concerned.


At the beginning and at the end, just like with Zara's.


So, as I said, it doesn't matter whether the advert is good or bad, just so long as it's memorable.


There certainly have been advertising campaigns which have hurt the sales of products, but I've never heard of one which did so because the adverts were annoying.

I see. Didn't seem that funny to me, but there you go.


So I was right with "just as much". I thought it had maybe been more, but obviously I was wrong there.


That isn't quite what I said. I still say that the GoCompare adverts, even if they annoy, are good.


Not just annoying, but offensive though?