'Celebrity Apprentice' keeps brand strong with keen trickery
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NBC's "The Celebrity Apprentice" is a masterful bit of what magicians call misdirection. While you're focused on the game, the action is elsewhere. The reality is, it's a stroke of product-placement genius, disguised as a competition.
It's a vanity project that wraps itself in respectability by raising money for charity.
It's the video equivalent of Us magazine, pretending to be a business-school text.
"The Celebrity Apprentice" holds on to a core audience of 6.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings, even against the powerhouse Country Music Awards special on CBS April 18. With all the masquerading, it's doing something right.
Give the show credit for not posing as a democracy: Unlike the popular TV song and dance competitions that posit our votes as the deciding factor, "Apprentice" is all about Donald Trump's whims. This is the closest most Americans will ever get to a Manhattan corporate boardroom, where only the boss's whims count. If a man as successful as Trump thinks you should be fired, you should be fired!
The all-American concept balances altruism and capitalism. Players are charged with concocting advertising messages and marketing materials for sponsor's brands. If their sales pitch wins, the charity they represent wins. Whether the task is to create a Kodak storefront, a Right Guard ad, a Harry Potter 3-D experience or a Norton computer-security advertorial, there's a commercial hook.
Before Bret Michaels recent hospitalization with a brain hemorrhage, the former rock star raised $100,000 for the American Diabetes Association while pumping up his 1980s history with the band Poison and wearing an assortment of cowboy hats and bandanas with guyliner.
Curtis Stone, famous chef, has raised $40,000 for Feeding America while cooking the notion that celebrity chefs are the hottest things on television. (Beware of quasi-celebrities pushing their hotness.)
The message for aspiring MBAs is the importance of hard work. This season's two teams, divided by gender, have names extolling Puritan virtues: the women go by Tenacity, the men call themselves RockSolid. Better than Patience and Prudence, or Almost Famous and Formerly Almost Famous.
First Published May 1, 2010 12:00 am
