Help Me Settle An Argument...

As I'm sure my last few posts will imply, I am a fan of Really Bad TV. I mean, we're talking all sorts of reality stuff, NASCAR, cartoons--just wonderful, awful guilty pleasures.

There's a point, though, where "wonderful" and "awful" diverge entirely--and it was at this fork in the road that I found myself last night, accompanied by Donald Trump, all of his Apprenti, and the Sony Playstation marketing department.

For all you people who actually have lives and have thus never seen "The Apprentice", here's a summary. There are two teams, one composed of college graduates, the other composed of people who never finished college. The college-grad team is called Magna; the non-grad team is called Net Worth. Each week they compete in tasks having to do with the business world.

This week's task was to develop an ad campaign for Gran Turismo 4, a soon-to-be-released game for the Sony Playstation. The marketing people told the teams that the idea was to appeal to the "young, hip, urban" 18-to-34 male demographic. The ads were to be murals, painted on large empty walls in--wait for it--Harlem, and the teams were to receive creative assistance from--again, wait for it--renowned graffiti artists.

We'll get to my issues with the concept itself.

In the meantime: The Net Worth team project manager was an African-American woman, who pretty much took over the whole operation and shut out any ideas from her team. Her big emphasis was on not offending the residents of the neighborhood by going with overblown media stereotypes, and instead emphasizing the image of a revitalized Harlem. There were problems with this concept and its execution, but I could appreciate the sentiment.

The Magna team, on the other hand, found itself in the weeds almost immediately. The project manager was a little skinny white boy from an affluent background, and all the other team members came from circumstances ranging from "moderately well-off" to "filthy rich". None of them had any experience with Harlem, other than what they'd heard about it--all stereotypes, essentially--and none of them knew a damn thing about graffiti as art. Even their artist-consultant couldn't overcome their total Wonder-Bread-ness, which was agonizing to watch.

Here's where shit got wrong.

Realizing that they were well and truly screwed, Alex, the Magna PM, decided they needed a little more expertise than they had among themselves, which was zero. And so this skinny little white guy walked up to a group of African-American teenage boys and asked their advice.

At this juncture I ran into the living room from the kitchen and yelled, loud enough to scare the cats, "Please tell me they didn't just ask some black people for advice on how to create graffiti." Which they so totally just did.

Several years ago, I used to come into my current neighborhood to score drugs with Lou, my old roomie/lover/drug buddy. Lou was a bit of a redneck, although he was a fairly enlightened redneck. But he was a danger to himself and others, because he would automatically assume that every non-white person in any given neighborhood could point out where the drugs were. He almost got Firefly and me chased out of our apartment complex when he came to visit in North Carolina--he walked up to the wrong people and asked the wrong question, and that conversation went very bad, very fast. Firefly was livid; I was more pissed that nobody beat the hell out of him for being such a dumbass.

I thought of Lou when I saw what Magna was doing.

And yes, they got some replies that ALSO made my skin crawl: "Make it with money raining from the sky," stuff like that. Of COURSE that's what they're gonna get--these are TEENAGERS. They're immersed in media culture, which is a closed loop of stereotyping and regurgitation. The Apprenti, on the other hand, are supposedly business professionals--who should, at least on some level, be able to cull the wheat from the chaff when it comes to marketing ideas. (Of course, this was the same band of idjits who brought us, only a couple of weeks ago, commercials for Dove Body Wash that could have been titled "Goopy Runner" and "Gay Cucumber Porn". So perhaps I am expecting too much from them.)

What killed me, though: first, Alex immediately (and in some cases, inaccurately) incorporated some of the slang into his vocabulary--he was yapping on about "bling-bling" and "mad props" and "g-wheels" and there was verbal shrapnel everywhere, just from the extreme and infinite wrongness of those words coming out of that pretty little N'Sync-looking mouth. And second: the mural they ended up with--complete with a large fist, wearing a gold ring with a logo, and stuffed with money. All they needed would have been a weed leaf, a scantily-clad woman, and a well-rendered AK-47, and they would have had the superfecta of Bad 'Hood Cliches.

What's even WORSE than that: their mural won. (This had less to do with the quality of Magna's work, than with the fact that Net Worth's mural was kinda craptacular and failed to relate to the game at all, other than that they both had vehicles in them.)

Filled with my normal sense of righteous liberal outrage, I went over to Television Without Pity, which has some of the most deliciously-snarky message boards anywhere. And I posted an extended version of what I said above: "Please tell me they didn't go up to African-American males and ask for graffiti advice," followed by why, exactly, I took issue with that.

I got back a lot of "I didn't see what was so wrong with that," "I thought they were smart to ask their target demographic for help," and things along those lines. There were a few who agreed with me, but not many. So I amended:

"That was a large part of my problem with this task as a whole--the assumption that graffiti is the form of media that's most likely to resonate with the target demographic.

"If you noticed the (real) focus group, it was not composed entirely of African-Americans or males. Yet the Magnoids, faced with the question of who to approach about how to improve the concept, seemed (and I'm willing to give them a LITTLE leeway and assume the possibility of editing tricks here) to target African-American males exclusively. To me, that suggests that in the collective Magna consciousness lies the impression that African-American males are the ones most likely to know about graffiti....which is also, IMHO, implicit in the very construction of the task itself.

" (The Net Worth PM's) little megalomaniacal-artist episode aside, I liked that she saw Harlem as a community. Magna's view seemed much more shallow and mercenary from the details I saw. Great for winning tasks and impressing The Donald, but in terms of character? Not so great. "

Again--lots of "I think Magna was smart to enlist the target demo rather than just keep thrashing around not knowing what they were doing," and only a few "yeah, I thought so too"s.

And so now I'm wondering--is this just another symptom of my bleeding-heart-liberal-ness? Am I being wrongheaded in my thinking here?

I'm going to ask LJ and a couple of the guys, whenever they turn up next; but I'm interested in hearing what everyone else thinks. Because to me, this whole episode was just uncomfortable and awkward and wrong.