Philip, it turns out, has an obsession with pants – even when he’s talking about breakfast cereal. This week’s task requires the candidates to come up with a brand name, box design, cartoon character and 30-second TV commercial to advertise a new kind of breakfast cereal for kids. “It’s so natural,” says Philip in Ignite’s branding brainstorm, “you feel naked but with pants.” Mind you, even that’s a step forward from one of his other ideas – the “cereal killer”. Perhaps focusing on mass murder isn’t the best way to sell breakfast cereal to children.

Viewers will, in fact, learn a great deal about the British breakfast cereal market in tonight’s episode. At one end of your supermarket’s cereal aisle, you’ll find oats and muesli for grown-ups in muted packets – with the sugary kids’ cereals all down at the other end in garishly coloured boxes.

Ignite get (yet another) valuable lesson in time management when they run out of time and don’t actually visit their graphic designer in person. This despite the fact that the box is perhaps the most important element of the task: after all, it’s what Sir Alan can actually hold in his hand. Ignite end up with a lurid green box, but with virtually no text. And, if you looked at the very small amount of print that there is, you might believe that the recession has shrunk the Government’s healthy-eating recommendation to “three a day”.

Meanwhile I watch Empire, under Kate’s leadership, do some rather good work – at first. After last week’s task, Ben has been painted as the candidate that everyone loves to hate, but tonight we see another, more creative side to him. Yes, he’s still arrogant, but he contributes eagerly to their brainstorm. And he agrees to dress up in a parrot suit – a sort of Irish Norwegian Blue – for the commercial. (During filming, there was a marvellous moment when a passing child looked at him and said: “Hello birdy!”) Maybe all this hatred against Ben should be transferred to another candidate – though I couldn’t possibly say who.

And, while Empire get their box designed on time, they run into problems with their commercial: it takes Kate only a few seconds to throw out the vocals on which James and Yasmina have been working all day. And, if you’re going to hire a child actor to eat breakfast cereal in a TV ad, it’s helpful to check whether he has a nut allergy…

Over at Ignite, Philip and Lorraine rub each other up the wrong way, with Philip doing his usual trick of throwing a tantrum if his idea isn’t instantly accepted by the group – it would be a strong team leader indeed who would shout Philip down. He’ll go far, that boy – I’m just not sure in which direction.

One thing you can say for Lorraine is that her opinions are often right. But she hasn’t yet learned the trick of shutting up when it’s too late for things to be changed – which can understandably get on her team-mates’ nerves. Team leader Kimberly, a marketing consultant, says at the start of the episode that this is the task she’s been waiting for. Yet she then also says she’s not creative and that she won’t do presentations. All of which begs the question: what does she do?

Mind you, this is in my opinion a very difficult task. It’s much harder to convince the professionals at advertising agency McCann Erickson that your commercial is any good than it is to sell bars of soap on the street. Especially if you’re Ignite’s Mona, who has to learn that the object of a presentation is neither to make your audience cringe nor to state the bleeding obvious (“the box is green”). Fortunately for viewers at home, they will have to watch only a small portion of what we in the presentation room were subjected to.

Tonight’s episode, by the way, contains my favourite moment of the series so far. Poor Noorul, all dressed up in Ignite’s superhero costume, ends up sitting on a table in the garage of a suburban house waiting for the filming of their commercial to start – with his little matchstick legs swinging disconsolately underneath. Perhaps he thought the whole thing was a bit pants.

The Apprentice is on tonight at 9.00pm on BBC One.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/the-apprentice/5195858/The-Apprentice-2009-Margaret-Mountfords-Apprentice-Watch—Week-Five.html

Would you ever have imagined that your relationship status determines whether or not you’re likely to use a Facebook app? Me neither! And, the common belief is that the more wall activity a person has on Facebook, the more likely they are to send virtual gifts. Nope. Not true.
BLiNQ Media just released an unprecedented white paper that debunks common assumptions about social media behavior indicating branders may be missing the mark on their “sweet spot” of target users. No one has ever analyzed 117 million records in Facebook and the results are surprising!
The research is based on the analysis of Facebook application usage data comprising more than 9 million users and 117 million records. Some of the revelations include:
• A small percentage of the users accounted for a large percentage of the activity. For example, only 6% of the users were responsible for 56% of the activity.
• Not all users are in the 18-24 age bracket as assumed: The top 50% of high activity users of the social media app were 32 or older, while the lower app activity users were predominately 32 and younger (80%).
• While females represented the largest group of application users (73%), 54% of the men were more likely to be heavy app users.
• The majority of users (70%) took over 30 days to respond to a gifting request. Acceptance activity picked up after 30 days and continued until 132 days later.
• The most active wall posters are not the most active application users, at least for this app.
Bottom line is what seems like logical conclusions can sometimes be illogical on social networks like Facebook!