What The Apprentice reveals to us about where media is heading

Twenty years. That’s how long Lord Sugar has been pointing his finger across that boardroom table. Tim Campbell, who won the first series, now sits in the chairs once occupied by Nick Hewner and Claude Littner, watching a new generation pitch canned water and a literal cat tree with unswerving conviction.

There’s comfort in the familiarity of the format. The marketing task. The corporate away day. The scavenger mad dash. In this latest series, that hunt took place in Hong Kong, with the business hopefuls tasked with sourcing hand-painted mahjong sets and shrimp paste at knock-down prices.

Social media selling has become a lot more apparent in this series. The candidates who lasted longest weren’t necessarily the ones creating the best product. They were the ones who understood how to sell it best. Finding the hook, injecting the humour, and making content that earns attention on the scroll, digitally.

Enter: The social natives

The latest Digital News Report from Reuters Institute makes that stark. ‘Social natives’, the 18 to 24-year-olds, are moving away from TV, print, and even news websites. Young people are paying more attention to individual news creators reacting and reporting the news on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube rather than traditional news brands.

In response, PA Media launched a dedicated 9:16 vertical video newsfeed built for social. ITV, BBC, and Sky News are all producing bespoke social video content, while CityAM is increasingly video-first in its reporting. Job titles at traditional media houses are also following with Programme Editors becoming Content Editors. Gen Alphas won’t see legacy media like The Sun or Metro as newspapers – they’ll see them as social-first publishers.

Format matters now more than ever. A brilliant PR campaign, packaged only as a press release, is a tree falling in a forest. Content must now work across TV, online, and clippable social simultaneously – not adapted after the fact but designed from the start.

Stories need to be easy to cut, share, and republish in a vertical frame. How does this product fit into someone’s life on a Tuesday morning commute, on a phone screen, in 30 seconds? What’s the version of this that gets forwarded on WhatsApp or through Instagram DMs?

That really is the PR brief. Not just creating the campaign, but making it travel.

I don’t plan to apply to The Apprentice any time soon, but I reckon I’d put myself up to be project manager for the marketing task.