Factor 3: Applied Creativity

The APP-rentice

  Don’t get me wrong, I love watching the Apprentice – it’s a highly entertaining show. However I can’t help but feel that it’s just a ‘classy’ version of Big Brother, with contestants constrained within Alan Sugar’s tasks rather than a house. The premise is the same – a show full of egos far larger than their real-life accolades truly warrant; a show full of people who feel like they’ve already ‘made it’, and all they need to do is demonstrate that fact to their potential new business partner, rather than a nation of telephone voters.



The ridiculousness of the pseudo-business challenges that are given week in, week out, really came home to roost for me this week when the contestants were told to build an iPhone App within 24 hours and whoever got the most downloads won. Lord Sugar reminisced about his humble beginnings in business and posed the non-rhetorical question: “is it possible to start a business with little financial means, in this day and age, and still find success? The answer is absolutely yes”.

Now I’m not going to disagree with that statement. I started my first digital agency with just £800, no real network of business contacts, and no experience of life within a marketing agency beforehand! Despite the stupidity of flying blind and learning lots of very hard lessons in a short space of time, by year 3 the business turned over £183k in that financial year... but what I disagree with is the preposterous way the show went on to demonstrate the ‘simplicity’ of generating revenue and building a business within the App market.

Anyone who watched the show and has a smart phone knows firsthand just how poor the apps that were developed truly were. That comes as no surprise... just 24 hours to conceptualise the app, generate the necessary ‘creative’ and release it to market? They didn’t stand a chance. However, by the end of the task, ‘Slang-o-tang’ garnered almost 4,000 downloads, and ‘Ampi-App’ over 10,000 – a remarkable feat for two truly awful products. How bizarre that both teams created audio-based apps with basic visuals supporting the sound bites... a small off-screen briefing on the technical constraints within the time frame maybe?

But what the show DID go on to demonstrate was that with the right contacts and media moguls at your disposal, no matter how poor the ‘product’, you can sell the unsellable; how truly social media can send a message to tens of thousands of people in just 24 short hours. How social media influencers can do great things for your business with just a few words distributed to their followers online. Yes, technology has yet again found a new way of levelling the play-field between the big boys with large financial resource and the entrepreneurs who just need to be in the right place at the right time to get the exposure they deserve.

How many businesses are out there with truly great products or services who would give anything for a 3 minute spot at an industry trade show, with a room full of experts and journalists primed to opine on their brilliance? With several major websites at their disposal, primed to give them huge prominence on their homepage regardless of the pap that’s put in front of them? The fairy tale theatre of the Apprentice makes for great entertainment but offers no real insight into what it takes to succeed in the real world, or the App market,  without Sugar daddy. With Sir Alan's business contacts and the huge resource of the BBC, convincing thousands  of people to download rubbish is a simple enough task.

For the rest of the business community who possess acumen and integrity (unlike the pretentious, desperate wannabe’s on the Apprentice), who have done their research, laboured over their business plan, tested the market, demonstrated proof of concept, managed their margins and now just need to spread the word, the fight to get noticed will always be a tough one when financial resource is limited. However, with the right marketing channels at your disposal, and experts such as ourselves who can help you get noticed, success will be an inevitability.