Archive for the ‘The Apprentice’ Category
Jessie J – Megastar
Pop star, Jessie J was shocked to see so many young girls falling down drunk during her performance at last weekend’s Trinity Ball. She will be in for an even bigger shock this July when she returns to sing at Oxygen, the annual orgy of music and drunkenness for Ireland’s youth. So who is this Jessie J who questions how much we drink? Does she not understand that young Irish people, including girls, love to party and get drunk to the point where they vomit down the front of their ball gowns? What’s your problem Jessie?
Jessie J was hardly known outside of her bedroom just fifteen weeks ago. So, apart from music industry insiders, no one knew about her at Christmas and before this Easter has arrived she is an international phenomenon. She is top of the charts and is being tipped by respected music critics, on both sides of the Atlantic, as the next global music sensation.
So what’s different about Jessie J? First she wasn’t manufactured on some show like The X Factor. She is a real star and they are born not made by some TV company.
Her talent has been nurtured on the West End Stage where she was a child performer. Many of the really big megastars, like Michael Jackson, have all clocked up a lot of stage miles before they go solo. Jessie J has served her time and thus brings an exceptional presence to her live performances, in this regard, on a par with Robbie Williams
She is a prolific songwriter, so prolific that when she writes a hit that doesn’t suit her gospel, which I will come back to later, she gives that hit to other stars such as Mylie Cyrus, or Alicia Keys. Yes, as a teenager Jessie J just happened to write platinum selling hits for the big stars.
She claims she has a catalogue of six hundred songs ready to be released to the world. Oh and by the way she is the best singer on the planet according to Justin Timberlake one of her many, many fans in the music industry. If you need any convincing about her amazing voice, check out her acoustic performances on You Tube. I direct you particularly to the BRMB recording of Price Tag.
But Jessie J isn’t just a singer, she is on a mission. She has a gospel and she is proselytising. She doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs and she preaches purity. Listen to the lyrics of her current number one Price Tag. The message from Jessie J is we all got carried away in the boom, obsessed with money and bling. She sings it was a bad time “when the sale came first and the truth came second”.
If you watch the music video of Price Tag, you realise she is against materialism, against big fancy cars, against girls in music videos displaying themselves as mere sex objects and so on.
Following economic crashes, societies not only adjust but they overturn the past. “Jessie J-ism” could become the new Victorianism of the 21st Century.
To see where this young woman is coming from watch the iconic music video of the global economic boom, I got a Feeling from the Black Eyed Peas. That’s the one that goes “tonight’s goin’ to be a good, good night”. The song was written just before the Lehman Bros crash that has lead to the banking meltdown in the developed world. It is a most superb anthem to excess. Its message is fill up your cup, let it over flow, if you go out tonight – get smashed. All the scenes in the video feature girl on girl, lesbian action to make it risqué and excessive.
Again check out You Tube and see for yourself that in the last sixty seconds of this video ten girls, not one guy, fall down on the floor or on the street or in the gutter because they are drunk or have overdosed. The message from this music video to young women is you can’t have a good time if you have enough brain cells to recall it the next day.
Jessie J challenges all this. Do it Like a Dude, her first hit, she has explained is partly about how girls make such great efforts to look pretty but still the boys go around with their trousers down around their butts and in hoodies. Maybe the girls should behave badly like the boys or act like dudes. Who You Are, the title track from her first album says to women not be crushed by the air brushed models of the magazines but be yourself because you are special.
It would be a mistake to dismiss her as just a mere singer-songwriter from Essex. Despite all the hype about social networking music is still the soundtrack and staple diet of youth. Songwriters can’t change the world but they do have immeasurable influence. John Lennon’s Imagine hasn’t delivered world peace but from the moment we heard it, the world had changed.
One thing is very clear. Under 25s listen to music radio and their parents, the over 45s, listen to talk radio. The under 25s have already moved on from our economic crash but the over 45s are still looking for someone to blame and venting their anger on radio talk shows. The kids have already got over it. The older generation, their parents can’t get out from underneath it.
Since the economic downturn the music soundtrack has been changing and with that, perhaps, the moral compass of the world’s youth. The male American rappers, partying by the pool with all the sexy girls and showing off their pimped cars and possessions, are fading fast and the purity girls have taken over. Adele, followed by Ellie Goulding and now the campaigner, Jessie J. Coincidentally the last three Brit Award Critics Winners.
Pop music is the ultimate fashion and is ever changing and mega trends come and go. The soft porn era of music videos all started on a Sunday afternoon on the late Vincent Hanley’s MTUSA with Madonna writhing around on that boat in Venice singing “Like a Virgin” and the era officially died in 2011 when Jessie J’s Price Tag lyric posed the question regarding all these soft porn type music videos “Am I the only one getting tired?”
It is far too early to say if Jessie J will have any significant, lasting impact on global youth culture but she is a very different role model than anything we have seen before. So the stage is set at Oxygen for the ultimate music culture battle between, in the red corner, the Lords of Excess, the brilliant Black Eyed Peas, representing the boom and the past and in the blue corner, the challenger, Miss Purity, the awesome, Jessie J representing hope and a new future but not as we know it Jessie.
The Year That Was..2010
Independent Group Local Newspapers 29/1/2011
This week I am going to look back on 2010. I am so conscious of what an awful year it was for thousands – many losing their job, others losing sleep about their mortgage and their mounting debts and, this Christmas, so many looking at the prospect of losing members of their family to emigration in the coming year. So I feel almost guilty that I have had such an eventful and productive year. The Editor has pointed out that there will be a fuller review of all the year’s international, national and, of course, local news here in the paper but has asked me to write a personal log of my year.
January started with me beginning to write this column. I have thoroughly enjoyed it and thank you so much for your most positive feedback! Like me, you too are fed up with the constant negativity of the national media.
In February I inadvertently made the headlines. The Irish Daily Mail ran two pages of photographs of me meeting, on a street in Dublin, with Sean Fitzpatrick, the now disgraced former boss of toxic bank, Anglo Irish. The story sarcastically suggested I was probably meeting Sean Fitzpatrick to see would he invest some of his pension money in my Dragons’ Den products. Though it was a chance meeting, I still had to inform the media that I had never met Sean Fitzpatrick before (or since) and I had never been a client of Anglo Irish. Eventually the story petered out, but for the first time in my life I knew what it was to be “paparazzi-ed”.
In March, during the run of Dragons’ Den on RTÉ, I hit the jackpot! Noelle O’Connor walked in to present her idea for a healthy, non synthetic, non smelling, 100% natural, organic sunless tan. In the first three months in pharmacies over the summer, TanOrganic generated over €1m in sales. It became the number one selling tan in Ireland. So, despite being in the middle of the world’s worst recession, the point was proven again – if you have a good Irish-manufactured product, regardless of the economy it will sell and sell.
At the end of April Gerry Ryan died. We now know this was probably as a result of cocaine use. I would never condone substance abuse but I am not really qualified to comment because I am one of a tiny minority in Ireland who has never drank alcohol or smoked tobacco and has certainly never tried any form of drug. I do have many vices just not those more common ones! What Gerry did was wrong. But I worked with Gerry and I will always remember him as one of the greatest radio presenters.
In May I was asked to go on the Late Late Show for the finalists in the Transition Year Young Entrepreneurs competition. One student had a brilliant idea, “The Wrap”. It is a little plastic thing for wrapping up and avoiding tangling of the wire of your earphones for your phone or I-pod. I was delighted the following week to introduce him to Vodafone, and now his concept is now a real product out there on the market. It proves yet again that our schools are teeming with boys and girls with great business ideas.
In June I started my summer-long involvement with Celebrity Bainisteoir. Definitely one of the highlights of my year was the warm welcome I got from the Roche Emmets football club and its community. I still feel the team and I let ourselves down, and that such a great club deserved to go further in the competition, but I loved every moment of my involvement. The experience reaffirmed for me what a great contribution the GAA makes to local communities across the country.
On the 11th July the nation witnessed the greatest daylight robbery ever. Sports fans from all over the country agreed that Louth was robbed of a deserved Leinster title and Meath also suffered ‘winning’ what became a sullied championship. We simply have to introduce video evidence into these key games.
In August I was asked by RTÉ Radio 1 to fill in for Ryan Tubridy, who was moving over to 2FM, before John Murray was available to start the programme. I hadn’t presented a radio programme for well over a decade and if the truth be told enjoyed it far too much. It was a pleasure to work with Annmarie Power, Aonghus McAnally and their team in Donnybrook.
In September I was doing the job interviews for the Apprentice for TV3. One of the final four and the eventual winner was Michelle Massey. On her CV it stated she had done some modelling so I had to ask her was there anything in her past that could embarrass a future employer. She then revealed her dalliance with Playboy TV. I can tell you now I was never, ever expecting that one. I had to keep it all secret until the programme aired in December.
In late October my fellow Dragons and I really felt the pressure when RTÉ informed us that for 2011 the programme was moving to a prime time slot, 9:30pm on Sunday nights. We were all concerned that in the recession people might not come forward with good ideas. But when we did get to the Den for recordings, we were mightily relieved at the high standard of business ideas. It is television, so the producers will still feature the wacky ideas, but this year there were plenty of sound business ideas. Also RTÉ confirmed that there will be a follow up series looking back on many of the people who featured in series one and two.
In November we had the ‘good’ news that it was in the ECB’s interest to come to our nation’s rescue and bail us out but at a price. Personally I was delighted with the development, because I see it as the turning point on the road to recovery. The media kept pushing a line that we should default. We can’t default but we must restructure our debt in approximately 18 to 24 months from now. So we take this deal and in two years time after Portugal, Spain and maybe even Italy have required ECB/IMF assistance then we can, as a group of countries availing of the bailout, force the senior bondholders to restructure our debt. They will be forced to write a large percentage of it off. Of the group, which country has the strongest exports? Yes, Ireland. I assure you we will eventually come out of this valley of tears and our little nation can be great again.
In December Noel Dempsey followed his cabinet colleague, Dermot Ahern, and announced he wouldn’t contest the General Election. Dermot Ahern would have got re-elected but Noel Dempsey was doomed. He claimed he was doing it because he is over 55 years of age. The facts are party sources in Meath-West were forecasting that he could only muster, at best, 2,000 votes. Worse again his running mate, Deputy Johnny Brady, would poll better. So Dempsey, a former poll topper, couldn’t face the ignominy of being eliminated in an early count and bowed out on a fat pension. We so badly need the New Year’s General Election to draw a line under all the fall out of the Celtic Tiger and start on the road to recovery. To you and yours, a Happy New Year and all the best for 2011.
Any Marketing Geniuses out there?
Good morning what a fantastic Monday morning.
If you have just caught up with us recently, I blog twice a week. Thursday nights, 11:15pm, after Dragons’ Den is broadcast and Monday mornings. They are two definite updates but of course as you have seen I will also go in and update from time to time.
Looking for Great Marketing Ideas
There are now thousands of people following this blog. I am flattered especially by so many overseas friends from around the globe. This is a big resource and I want to use it.
So please check out www.TanOrganic.com and www.Hidbin.ie
I want your advice on how we should best market these two products. Gives us your views on both or which ever one takes your fancy.
Let me give you a bit of a steer. For Tanorganic, the 100% natural, organic, anti-aging, healthy, sunless tan-lotion I am looking to really grab the Irish public’s attention when it is launched mid to late May. I am thinking of billboards around the cities of Ireland and a large prize for the most beautiful tanned woman to appear actually live on the billboard and wave at people as they go by. Please don’t involve yourself if you think it is sexist or demeaning of women etc. It is a beauty product aimed at women and also it is a bit of summer fun. If you can’t get your head around that you are wasting your own and our time. Don’t restrict yourself. Let your imagination runawy with itself. Please submit your ideas for this one to info@tanorganic.com Now don’t restrict them to the billboard concept I just want you to know what I am thinking.
Hidbin, as you know is a synthetic screen hedging that neatly hides your ugly wheeliebins. “Making the unsightly unseen.” It costs €99 for a one bin unit and €179 for a two bin unit. Can you think of any guerrilla marketing tactics for this concept. Please send your best ideas to info@hidbin.ie
Our Last Show This Thursday
Thursday’s show is the last in the series and I genuinely believed they have saved the best to last. I am actually going to be out of the country with all the Dragons, well actually Sean can’t make it now. We are going on a late season ski trip to Zermatt. It is all down to Sarah’s great generosity. I am not the facebook type but I will ask Sarah for her permission to report from there and her wonderful chalet, www.chaletgrace.comI am told it is literally out of this world, so Bobby, Niall and myself are really looking forward to a few days ski-ing and crack with the hostess with the mostess.
Great Ideas and a number of Investments
The show on Thursday, and I will be blogging at 11:15pm directly after the show, features some really interesting pitches including an Irish developed, I-Phone App’ and you will also get to see just how bad Sean Gallagher is at hurling. If you are a Dragons’ Den regular and you followed last year’s first series I’d like to know why you think this was even better? I say it is better because the ratings are even higher. During the series the programme had a bigger audience than the main evening 9 o’clock news (Programme 6). That’s a large audience for 10:15pm and the viewers stay right until the end until well after 11pm.
Desperate Housewives twinned with Dragons’ Den
Also we are informed there was a very large number of female viewers. In fact the programme was “diaried” and “twinned”, we are told by the media buyers in the advertising agencies. That means about 125,000 women had two favourite shows per week, that they definitely would NOT miss. Desperate Housewives on Tuesday and Dragons’ Den on Thursday. Sean says he knows why, he claims it is his sex appeal. I argue his most endearing quality is his modesty. But if anything, I believe, it is down to the humour. Niall O’Farrell was just so funny at times this year. For example when he held up the Feel Good energy boost cocoa ball and said “It looks like something you’d find behind the couch,” I cracked up. Bobby can be so brilliant at giving fantastic advice to the point and succinctly and then the next minute he can crack a great joke. And all the audience research tells us women are fascinated by our Sarah. I feel privileged to be in such great talented company.
Eugenia Cooney Producer
Sadly not coming away on our little Dragons’ Den trip, though we did everything to twist their arms, are Larry Bass and Eugenia Cooney. Larry, the Executive Producer, is at the TV festival in Cannes this week. By the way that’s where he bumped into Mark Burnett in a lift in 2004 and that led to him acquiring the rights to both the Apprentice and Dragons’ Den. Both were invented by the genius of Burnett.
But the genius behind our Dragons’ Den is, Producer, Eugenia. She and hubby Ed’ are attending a family wedding this weekend and couldn’t join us. I would have dropped my family to go to Chalet Grace but Eugenia is a good Dundalk woman and they value family not like us south Louth, Drogheda types who eat their young, well that’s what they say about us in Dundalk.
600,000 Viewers
The success of the programme, and the almost 600,000 viewers a week is down to Eugenia who takes it from people applying to come on, vetting them, accepting a fraction to come to studio, recordings for weeks, editing down 120 hours to about 7 hours in total for the full eight shows of the series and she is across every item until the last credits roll this Thursday night.
We have been honoured to work with such a great leader.
I will talk to you on Thursday night.
Bye for now.
But before we start, Congratulations to The Apprentice
Eventually after we congratulate Shinawil for winning the IFTA for best Television entertainment programme for the Apprentice, we all fall quiet and the programme starts. Expect a new opening sequence. There are no longer shots of Dragons and helicopters but we are now seen in a working environment. I believe this is a big improvement and is more reflective of the way we actually spend our working days.