The Apprentice English wine task leaves a sour taste for one contestant

This week, the candidates were asked to create an awareness campaign for English sparking wine – one of my favourites, the advertising task!

Most people, including myself, dont realise how difficult it is to make a TV advert. When I was on the show, our task was to sell trainers and while it was immensely difficult, it was also one of the most enjoyable tasks. The key thing to recognise is that, while the final output isnt always up to standard, considering its been done in 2 days, its a good prototype.

In a real business context, getting an advertising agency to create a TV advert in 2 days is almost unheard of – it normally takes 2 days to get the ideas out, let alone producing and editing the ad!

In this task, I felt the candidates completely missed the boat on the brand values – English sparkling wine is competing with the hoity toity champagnes, and the brief was to create a campaign on brand awareness that would be high quality and aspirational.

Both teams missed this message completely, both in terms of the website and TV advert. In my opinion, both websites were terrible – in terms of layout, look and feel and other design features. Most aspirational brand awareness campaigns would focus on what the product is, why it is special, why the customer should desire it, and the execution is typically simple, sophisticated and sleek. Instead both websites looked like they were advertising student hostels or summer let homes. While Ricky seemed to pick up on the quality theme, the execution was severely lacking.

Going back to my advertising task for selling the trainers – I found the hardest thing was the creation of the TV ad. ITs very easy to get swept away in the direction and the artistic elements of the concept, but it was really hard to get the balance right with the focus on the product.

In the end our ad looked like it was a reject from the 80s – but it was a valuable learning experience. We must have spent over 10 hrs editing a 30 sec ad as we had to work with way too much footage. Another important aspect was the quality of the actors you use. Experienced TV actors know how to hold their body and face relative to the camera and can be critical in getting the shots right, therefore reducing footage and therefore reducing time in the edit suite.

Jenna had to go, although I was disappointed that it wasnt a double firing as Stephen deserved to get the boot as well. The look on the faces of the wine board was abysmal and they must have been wondering whether their attempt at getting some prime time exposure had really back fired. I think the French champage makers can sleep easy after last night’s performance by the Brits.

Had you heard of English sparkling wine before? Do you think the right person got fired? Let us know below.