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.
4 Comments