So, last night’s episode of The Apprentice was the one where the teams have to create an advertising campaign, with the assistance of a London agency, to present to avowed ad hater Alan ‘Sir Alan’ Sugar.  With Sugar’s brief ringing in their ears- something along the lines of ‘I don’t want any poncey nonsense that’s going to win the Montrose (sic) award for advertising tossers; I want something that will flog some trainers’ – the teams were dispatched to ‘award-winning top agency’ CHI, who were enlisted to help them produce their campaigns.

Agreeing to let the cameras into an agency is a tricky business. We all remember the St Lukes documentary debacle. Clearly, the producers’ objective isn’t to make advertising agencies look smart or talented, it’s to make an entertaining show. And if that means making you and your entire industry look like a bunch of twats, so much the better. CHI didn’t come out of as badly as they might have done. (Though Johnny’s explanation to the teams of ‘What we call the Big Idea’ was a borderline Adverising Tosser moment.) But the main conclusion I think the viewer might have drawn from the show is that advertising must be harder to do than it looks, because both teams produced work of utter, utter shiteness that could have been bettered by a class of nine year olds. One group had the brilliant idea of targeting urban kids with a trainer called ‘Street’. Their video was accompanied by an excruciating Ali G-style rap by a posh bloke called Simon whose idea of ‘the Street’ is probably a nice country lane in Hampshire. The other team called their brand Jam (there was a memorable moment where someone said ‘the name does remind me of preserves’) and came up with the jaw-dropping ‘Big Idea’ – ‘Because music’s in your sole’. (Geddit?)

If they’d presented the work round here, they’d never have made it back to the boardroom to present to Sugar. The lot of them would have been fired on the spot by our CDs.

Love the show, though.

We try not to be too bothered about what they write about us in the trade press, good or bad. Better to be talked about than ignored. But every now and again there’s an article that makes me choke on my breakfast bacon sandwich. This morning’s front page story in Campaign was one of those.  Anyone reading the article above would probably infer that W+K has screwed up on the Visit Wales account and that Wales are therefore holding a secret pitch for the business. Indeed, I received a number of messages of condolences from Campaign readers who assumed we had already lost the account. Truth is, Visit Wales and W+K are very happy together. Next year, in 2008, Visit Wales will be required, as are all public sector accounts, to go through a formal review process on the third anniversary of our winning the business. This tender process, which is a matter of public record, is not referred to anywhere in Campaign’s article. I hope that when that review happens we will be sucessful in retaining the account. In the meantime, I contacted Noel Bussey who wrote the article to offer him a bet — £1000 of my own money says we’ll still have the business at the end of 2007. Funnily enough, he didn’t accept.