What an interesting episode this was. The task for this round was to create a mobile printing experience for the company Kodak on the sidewalks of New York. The teams were provided with an Airstream bus, Kodak cameras as well as printers to do so. The winning team would be decided by Kodak executives based on originality, brand messaging, and profit.

At the start Gene Simmons was asked by Donald Trump on whether or not he would be willing to lead team Empresario since they have yet to win a challenge. He accepted the challenge and as a result became the project manager for them. For team Hydra, Tito Ortiz was the project manager this time around. Donald Trump also had Jim Cramer, from Mad Money, as a special guest to help observe the team’s performances.

Similar to the last episode, Gene Simmons did not want to waste time talking to the executives. Instead, he sent Carol Alt and Nely Galan to do so while he focused on creating the visual presentation experience. The team created a very well designed presentation such as plastering the Airstream bus with the slogan and Kodak name. Nely Galan did not seem to listen to the executives very well though and as a result the information relayed back to Gene Simmons did not appear to be ideal.

Team Hydra did sit down with the Kodak executives to learn about the company’s product and direction. As a result, they seemed to be in tact with what would make the executives happy. They did experience a huge setup while Stephen Baldwin took photos of Tito Ortiz and Lennox Lewis on a table appearing as if they have been knocked out by the Kodak ink.

As they got off the table, all the weight caused it to flip up and it just happened that the laptop that had all of their art work had coffee spilt on it. As a result, they lost all the work on the computer and had to do a lot of last minute printing which made their presentation look very unpolished.

Team Empresario’s direction was to create a presentation revolving around a slogan of “It’s a Kodak world” where they attempted to highlight Kodak and its products. Team Hydra’s slogan was “The ultimate knockout experience” where they focused on Kodak’s new ink that enables people to print a lot more documents compared to regular ink in printers. Despite the poor presentation, in the end Team Hydra won as they did a better job conveying the message that the Kodak executives were looking for.

The boardroom got very interesting as it seems like a lot of people were more focused on getting rid of the people based on the future as oppose to the task at hand. Virtually every time Trump asked people on who they would fire the answer would be completely unexpected. For this boardroom session, Trump really wanted to fire Nely Galan and kept hinting at it.

When Trump asked Gene Simmons who he would bring into the boardroom, at first he asked if he could bring just one person and Trump agreed. Simmons mentions that he wanted to take Omarosa based one’s loyalty and Trump was just in shock. Now usually in past shows if the person made a strange request Trump would simply fire the project manager. Instead, he insisted that Gene Simmons choose another person as well and he then chose Jennie Finch.

To me, it looked like Trump really did not want to get rid of Gene Simmons or Omarosa for that matter. In the end, Trump mentioned that he didn’t really have a choice and had to fire Gene Simmons.

This was such an interesting episode especially with what happened between Trump and Simmons. I really liked Simmons’ talk about focusing on loyalty in people and how he was willing to stick to his final product to the very end. While it definitely wasn’t the best choice strategically if the objective was to stay in the show as focusing just on the task would have most likely resulted in Nely being fired, he was a very admirable business person there I thought. Makes me want to learn more about his background.

On semi related note, fellow Vancouver blogger and frequent reader Stewart Marshall actually works for Kodak and he informed me that before the show aired the staff at Kodak received a memo about the show encouraging people to watch it. He has made a post about it too with some behind the scene links and you can click here to read it.

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In this episode the task was to film and edit a 30 second commercial for the company Pedigree about adopting dogs that currently don’t have a home and family as a lot of people are afraid to take dogs that have been neglected/abandoned. Which ever team’s video impresses the Pedigree executive the most would win. On top of that, the winning project manager would get $25,000 towards their charity. The project managers were Gene Simmons for Team Hydra and Nely Galan for Team Empresario.

The concept on the men’s side was to use Lennox Lewis to show a story on how even tough guys have a soft spot for an animal in need. On the women’s side the idea was to show clips of various dogs with voice over actors as if the dogs are telling you how they used to have a great life to encourage you to adopt them.

Guess the most interesting moment was when Ivanka walked into the Men’s meeting to do the usual see how the group is doing. Gene Simmons didn’t want her to be listening in and even questioned if she was going to relay the information to the other team and she definitely took extreme offense to it all.

When they showed the videos, Team Hydras version was superior in virtually every way I thought. Actually, some other people that I knew who were watching as well liked it so much they said they wanted to see it again when it airs on commercial. Team Empresario’s had a little too much story information to digest effectively in 30 seconds in my opinion. Team Hydra did in fact end up winning. You can see the video here:

In the boardroom it came down to Nely Galan, Nadia Comaneci and Carol Alt. While it looked like Nely Galan should have been the one to let go which she was even kind of willing to accept, Nadia Comaneci seemed very quiet and reserved. Because of that, ultimately it was believed that she did not have that leadership quality to lead the team in the future and she was fired.

That reminds me of all the times where you meet people who are incredibly awesome at what they do and so you assume they will be equally energetic/confident in a similar scenario only to see it not being the case. Like they say, you can’t be a master at everything.

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So a new season has started and this time all of the candidates are celebrities. Instead of competing for a job, they are competing for money to give to charity. Too bad there isn’t anything like this here in Canada as I thought the circumstances should make this edition very interesting and cause worthy.

The teams like usual were separated with the men going against the women. The men decided to call themselves team Hydra and consisted of the following people:

-Gene Simmons
-Lennox Lewis
-Piers Morgan
-Stephen Baldwin
-Tito Ortiz
-Trace Adkins
-Vincent Pastore

The women called themselves team Empresario and had the following people:

-Carol Alt
-Jennie Finch
-Marilu Henner
-Nadia Comaneci
-Nely Galan
-Omarosa
-Tiffany Fallon

My first reaction was “Omarosa?” She’s got to be my least favorite person who has appeared on the show. She threw in a comment on how she has changed, but like some say action speaks louder than words.

The task was to sell hotdogs with the team making the most money would win. Project managers were Stephen Baldwin and Omarosa. On the men’s side Gene Simmons came up with an idea where instead of just focusing solely in getting people on the streets to buy hotdogs he started to contact wealthy people he knew beforehand and asked if they would want to show up and buy say a $5000 hotdog for charity. It was funny seeing how carefree he is too whenever he came up with ideas.

On the women’s side they were discouraged to use their celebrity status and to focus in selling the hot dogs by focusing on the product type of approach. Omarosa was stern and one sided about her decisions it seemed.

It was interesting to see how much money both teams were bringing in. There was also a visit from New York’s mayor Bloomberg to each of the team’s venue. Team Empresario was doing poorly it seemed and so one person stepped up and went against Omarosa’s direction to not use their celebrity status and began calling some of her contacts which resulted in purchases such as $5000 for a bottle of water.

In the end though, the men clobbered the women team as team Hydra made $52,286 and team Empresario made $17,038.79. Trump then mentioned that all the earnings would go to the winning project manager’s charity and in this case it went to Stephen Baldwin.

In the boardroom it came down to Omarosa, Tiffany and Carol. Tiffany essential got pinned down by not contacting the people she knew such as Hugh Hefner and she didn’t really try to defend herself too much. The whole thing didn’t make too much sense when you think about it as it was Omarosa’s decision to not use their celebrity status. Gene Simmons referred to her as a “cockroach”.

Evidently, Tiffany was the one that got the axe. I was just sitting there thinking “They must be keeping Omarosa there to make people mad”. That Carol lady seemed like a real fighter though. A comment was then made by Trump on how unfortunately in most cases in business the nicest people are the ones who go first.

Feels like for this celebrity edition it will come down more to who know who where the tasks can kind of won even before it starts. If history says anything though, they sure gave Gene Simmons a lot of camera time which usually meant that the person won’t be the winner. Like they say, sometimes it’s not what you know but rather who you know.

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The end of the season has come. The finale for the most part felt like they were running out of ideas for this year and so most of the happenings seemed like it was just a filler to take up an hour worth of airtime. It basically started out by highlighting all of the events, candidates and briefly the order that everyone was fired and why.

Then Trump, along with his son and daughter, basically continued off from last week’s event where the candidates made the mini movie about the Renuzit product. Nicole was criticized for choosing Tim for the task as it demonstrated a sign of weakness they say and Frank was criticized for choosing Surya since they did not get along. Overall, Trump felt that Frank had too many liabilities and for Nicole Trump he didn’t believe in an “inter-office romance” and so they were the first to be fired. That wasn’t very surprising I’d say.

So, it basically came down to Stefani and James and they then showed clips of their current professional and working life. The best reply of the night I thought came when Stefani kept saying good things about James and so Trump mentioned how by listening to her it sounded like she was basically implying that he should hire James. She replied by saying if he was listening to her then he should hire her and then she would hire James to work for her.

Overall, the criticism was that Stefani seemed like she was always under the radar which raises concerns about her leadership ability and for James the main comment was how he said certain things throughout the process which bothered Trump a lot (I’m not exactly sure which ones he was referring to in particular). Ultimately, James was fired and Stefani was hired. The funny thing is I get to bug my friend a bit now as near the beginning of the season we both just took an educational guess on who would win and he chose James and I chose Stefani. Aside from personality reasons, a big reason I chose her was the way all the video editing was done as it reminded me a lot of the previous winners in regards to the type of airtime they were getting to make everyone look a certain way.

This season wasn’t too exciting overall I’d say. I was disappointed that there wasn’t a final one on one task either as we didn’t really get to see how the final two would function on their own. As mentioned, maybe they were running out of ideas or couldn’t arrange a big enough task event. There weren’t any previews for a next season either, though I doubt it is going to be the last at this point. It was a new experience blogging about each episode as well. Too bad I didn’t start doing this earlier as it would have been great to have a collection of it. Till next time.

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This episode kind of bothered me, in a light hearted way, and kind of felt unpolished compared to previous episodes. Early in beginning it was announced that this was the final task and that the candidates, who were in pairs consisting of James and Stefani with Nicole teaming up with Frank, would have to choose two other candidates who were previously fired to help them in this upcoming task. I thought that was kind of strange as in previous season the final task would be a one on one showdown between two people.

James and Stefani decided to choose Angela and Aaron. Frank and Nicole decided to go with Tim and Surya. I personally couldn’t believe they chose Surya of all people considering how much they conflicted with each other before. The task this time around was that the two teams had to write, produce and direct a 60 second mini movie that would be shown to a movie audience. The mini movie would basically be a commercial for an Air Freshener product called Renuzit. Now the interesting thing was that Trump mentioned that at the end of the task himself along with his colleagues and the Renuzit executives would “make a determination on who we like”. That was kind of odd as he usually says something along the lines of “someone will be fired”.

In a humorous way, most of the filming and production aspects that the two teams were conducting irritated me as I have a background in film which made me more critical on what was happening and the end result. Guess it is kind of like a chef going crazy by watching people overcooking their food. James and Stefani’s idea was to have a courtroom scenario where a guy was being accused by his wife that he stunk up the house after a poker game. However, the guy uses the Renuzit product which got rid of the odor and hence he covered his tracks.

Frank and Nicole’s concept was to show people using the product in various circumstances such as an office environment. They also had a portion where this kid was in a hospital bed and complaining about a “bum” that was next to him who really stank up the place. Of course, you then see them using the product to get rid of the smell. Both groups had their fair share of conflicts it seems.

There was this one part where James kept telling this actress to say the word “Interesting” over and over again as he wanted her to do it a specific way. She said that word so many times that I’m sure the word began to lose its meanings to her. When it comes to directing, I was told a quote before that went something along the lines of a good director never tells an actor how to act. Funny thing is, he spent so much time trying to get a perfect shot and in the end it got cut out as he didn’t really have enough good footage of the other parts of the story to make sense of it all.

Frank and Nicole seemed to have played more of an individual game I thought as during the shoot it was all Frank with Nicole taking it easy and during editing it was mostly Nicole. They had their spurt moments as well such as during the editing time where Frank kept giving inputs which broke Nicole’s concentration. This was the end footage result for both:

Kind of hard to say which one I preferred personally. If I had to choose one I’d say overall James and Stefani’s video seemed a bit more smooth and sensible overall. On top of that, at the end they had a product shot with the company’s website printed on it which is usually an effective way to entice someone to learn more about a product incase the commercial didn’t fully convince them of its greatness. In the end though, Trump and the Renuzit executives simply deliberated on the candidates performances. As it turns out, no one was fired. Trump instead told everyone to gather their belongings and head home as he will meet everyone next week in the boardroom in-front of a live audience.

Well, this is definitely different. Wonder if there will be a live task that they will have to do or if it is going to be like an hour long boardroom debate. Maybe multiple people will get hired too. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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