No matter who the team is, the promotional videos are always 100% tripe.

I bet a bunch of 13 year old could make better videos. Never mind, I bet. I have full confidence they could!

It's always the same rubbish storyboard. Someone meets someone else, then they chat inanely for a few seconds and one recommends a product.

Utter tripe. Lord Sugar should have fired two last night, one from each team!

Because most entrants to the apprentist do not have a brain cell between them

Its design by some sort of drunken committee almost, you've got everyone wanting their contribution to shine in case LS comes knocking and thus any real ideas get swallowed up in bitter fighting.

The serious/genuine answer (giving the contestants a lot of benefit of the doubt) would be "time & resources" - they probably only have an hour or so to film, with just one camera & sound guy, plus a few hours to edit, and you're never going to get anything vaguely "professional" done like that...

I also suspect the never-seen project guidelines the teams have to follow specify things like what locations are available (restaurant, skate park etc.) and that they have to have at least one actor/actress in it so they have a casting session to film and so on (there are 60 minutes of TV to fill, remember....)

All that said however, I'm not sure why they're always such basic bl**dy awful ideas that don't look or sound like any TV advert anyone has seen for over 30 years...

Spot on, if they had a decent budget and a week to film it they could use better locations but they only have a time frame of a few hours so they are severely limited. That said with all of the so called expertise the contestants supposedly have it still comes out like the kind of thing a year 10 media student would do for their GSCE project.

Even despite the time, do they have to be so damn corny. The boys team was horrendous! Yeah, cool! It was straight from the 80's. To be honest, in terms of style, the girls wasn't bad. The fact it was in a toilet didn't matter, it still looked glossy and was only let down by the rubbish actresses voice saying something like the next best thing to Japanese food is the Jeans. But the skateboard one for the lads was just painful to watch.

Yes I'd imagine a lot of this true. When the girls were choosing a song for the ad, it looked to me like they were going through a list of songs (presumably ones the BBC had clearance to use).

That being said, there's no real reason why some of them can't come up with a better script. "Definitely cool".

I felt embarrassed for the experts watching.




Yeah but all the videos, even going back to when The Apprentice started, all have the same storyboards.


Which then results in the same sh***y videos we've seen time and time again.




LOL. Precisely.

I'm not sure whether credit should be given for the adverts at least not being inadvertently funny, like the drunk mum with a jukebox, or the *concierge service* porno.

There were glimmers of hope for the girls, but their brand and target didn't mesh. The boys should've gone after the men's market and gone full ham with topless fit dudes and baby oil.

just catching up with last night's episode and the comment from karen about it being an unfortunate choice to use "shake it off" for their advert when it was being filmed in a toilet

Quite probably. It explains why The Vapors Turning Japanese wasn't used.

Karren was a star yet again this week. I could watch the whole series of her just for her facial expressions.

(Surprisingly she was quite warm to Jessica even she behaved like an immature uni student. She has a soft side. Thank God)

It's really weird because I've noticed something that I've only just noticed right now.
Why do all these promotional videos feel like they've been made by the same person?

Seriously. Across all series these promotional videos have exactly the same style. feel, tone, quality, texture, writing, performances, editing style, and humour.
How is that possible?
With different people making these things you'd think that you'd see some variety in how they come across. But you don't. They all feel exactly the same, like they've all been made by one person.

Wonder what sort of video the big K would of produced in 5 mins...if i was a project manager i'd of given him exactly 5 mins and laughed probably at inability to produce anything as he seems to know what he wants but not always how to get it.

The acting was unbearably wooden. Someone off the street couldve pulled off a better impression of a human being.

There have been some decent ones over the years.
Didn't they have a tissues week once that was decent?

*cough* Raef and Michael *cough* I love my tissues.

Or Made in Japan (can't remember who that was by) but, yes, they did seem the obvious music choices and I wondered why nobody went down that route.

The videos were both indeed awful, maybe they insist there is some dialogue but they could have done something like the dancing Hunter videos on the tube at the moment but with just a fit torso and the top of the jeans with some kind of bright background behind and it would have been much more striking.

did you not watch last season (season 11)?!?!?!

that Desert shampoo total adverstisement and promo vid were really top, I had to watch that episode again

As was pointed out, that was because Dillon had cast models and not actors.

Karren had it exactly right. Shake It Off in the toilet; trying to brand luxury goods in a toilet; no obvious connection between sushi and jeans except they are both Japanese.

The one point on which both teams were unlucky was that Lord Sugar randomly decided that it did not matter the jeans were made in Japan. He could just as easily swung the other way and said that was the most important feature. But even there, the teams did a half-arsed job (see sushi, above) and did not defend their choices in the boardroom by pointing to Japanese brands like SuperDry or Uniqlo.

That is the key observation. What teams should do but never seem to is just think of what a genuine advert for this sort of product looks like, and then copy it. Instead they unleash their inner Ricky Gervais and write a 60-second sketch or playlet.

It is the same with the posters at the interactive (or not) bus shelters. They forgot to add any indication of what products they were supposed to be advertising. Maybe the candidates are all so successful in their own businesses they never travel by bus, or look out of the window in their chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Or find time to read Cosmo or Vogue or even the bloody Sun has adverts in it.

Haha, you make a good point. All of them have great difficulty impersonating real people.

Of course there are limitations in the brief but that should not prevent them being creative. The idea is probably to test their creativity by limiting their options. I doubt the girl's brief made them use a club toilet location.

I think part of the problem is people don't really watch adverts, they just absorb them. So when asked to make one all they can think of is to make a short story, which results in the corny stereotyped ads they make. Lord Sugar gave them a hint this week by pointing out the actors and models don't have to speak.

Most adverts use voice actors. The models on screen don't usually speak. No need for a mini soap set up. Much better to have the voiceover describe the product concept than try and portray it with actors.

SuperDry isn't Japanese.

I did think it was a bit strange for him to criticise them for highlighting the Japanese element. If it wasn't important then why mention it in the beginning?