In this week’s episode of Celebrity Apprentice, the losing team fell into a common trap that often plagues presenters everywhere – TMI: too much information.  This week was a tough one for the board room, as even Donald said he felt that both teams produced an excellent product and performed well.  No one team member or project manager made any particular blunders.  As usual, with the typical TV show diversion tactics, the audience was led to believe that one team – Rock Solid – was on a path to defeat, due to Bret’s blatant disregard for the sponsors request for levity, only to be surprised with the revelation that Bret won the task due to that very same risk taking and creativity. 

The task this week was to create 3 radio commercials for Clockwork Home Services, the parent company to three brands: Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating, and Mister Sparky, America’s On-Time Electrician.  Bret was project manager for Rock Solid and Summer was project manager for Tenacity.  The executives from the parent company visited each team and among the specifications they revealed, was a very serious side, indicating they did not want any humor in the ads making fun of plumbers and electricians.  In spite of this Bret couldn’t help himself and injected some edgy, even a bit racy tone to the ads.  For this reason, it might be concluded that Bret’s team had a strike against them, but this also rendered their work original and creative which the executives liked.

Conversely, Tenacity stuck to the directives of the sponsors – a wise move, and kept the commercials professional and void of the type of humor the executives found distasteful.  Cyndi was having problems with her voice, but they had other professional commercial singers available to stand in.  Summer and Holly wrote the script for the commercial and packed a lot of information in, which was a challenge to fit into the 30 seconds allotted for the spot, but they managed to just get it in.

So, between these two approaches, especially when hearing all the commercials, it might appear a wash, and be difficult to determine a clear winner.  What it came down to however, was just that – the CLEAR winner.  What made the difference was that despite Rock Solid’s humor which the executives did not appreciate, they felt that the commercials that the Tenacity team created, tried to pack too much information into the 30 seconds, and therefore went too fast.  They were too difficult to understand.  As a result Rock Solid won the task, and Summer, as Tenacity’s project manager got fired.

As a speaker myself, this really hit home for me and I started to squirm in my chair, listening to this verdict in the boardroom.  I got to thinking about those times when I have had to do the fast speaking lawyer, auctioneer thing when giving a presentation and I have 20 slides left and someone in the back of the room holds up the 3 minute sign.  It’s tempting to try to pack all the great information you know about something into a speech or recording or sign or webpage or whatever.  If you are time boxed however, at some point you risk your audience losing the entire message because there is not enough white space between concepts for adequate comprehension.  There really can be too much information.  Less is more.  And on that note, I think I will end this article right there…

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