Adam Israelov becomes the fourteenth 'Apprentice' contestant fired

Done in by a bad branding campaign that he'd suggested, Adam Israelov, a 22-year-old risk manager from Atlanta, GA, was sent packing during Thanksgiving night's The Apprentice 4 broadcast, becoming the fourteenth contestant to be fired by Donald Trump.


The Apprentice 4's tenth episode began with the five remaining candidates meeting The Donald at Trump Bar, a bar inside Trump Tower. There, the candidates were told that their next task would involve creating a branding campaign for a new Shania Twain perfume. Using a new advertising technique called "wrapping," the teams would compete to market "Shania by Stetson," with the team that got the most consumers to call a 1-800 free sample number winning the task.

Since the Excel corporation was down to only two members and Rebecca Jarvis had served as the project manager for last week's task, Randal Pinkett led Rebecca on this week's task. Recognizing that his two-person team needed to work "smart," Randal decided to hire a "temp army" of street promoters that would market the perfume to passerbys. Working with two staffing agencies, Randal quickly secured sixty workers who would wear wrapped billboards around the entire city.

Meanwhile over at Capital Edge, Alla Wartenberg stepped up and offered to serve as her team's project manager. During their brainstorming session, Adam suggested that they wrap the horse-drawn carriages that serve Union Square and Times Square. Although the carriage effort would consume more than half of their $10,000 budget, Alla approved of the idea. But although she said she was "OK" with the horse carriage concept, Felisha Mason still felt the team needed a more immediate "call to action," and after voicing her concerns to Alla, Alla budgeted $1,500 for (as Adam described it) "Felisha's thing" -- the hiring of a fifteen-person street promotion team.

Later in the day, Randal and Rebecca began calling around the city looking to purchase some megaphones, only to unintentionally discover that Radio Shack had already been spending the day gathering all their New York stores' inventory for Capital Edge. Deciding to do some corporate sabotage, Randal and Rebecca beat Capital Edge to the store and instead purchased the nine megaphones for their own team. While Adam seemed more accepting of the move, Alla was "infuriated," vowing that "karma" would catch up with Randal and Rebecca's "dirty" actions.


On the day of the campaign, Alla and Adam made it clear that they felt the horse carriage campaign would be the more effective marketing tool and criticized the appearance and language skills of the temp workers that Felisha had secured. Although Adam insisted that in the end, the carriages "looked great," the team had some difficulty wrapping the adhesive plastic around the vehicles' non-flat surfaces.

Over at Excel, Randal and Rebecca decided to turn the appearance and language skills of their own temp workers into a positive, deciding that "real New Yorkers have real appeal to other real New Yorkers." The duo distributed their army across the city and also attempted to turn the non-English speaking skills of their Hispanic temps into a positive by redirecting them to Spanish Harlem.

As the day went on, it appeared that Excel's campaign was proving far more effective than that of Capital Edge. While Capital Edge had decided to spread its sixty-person team over a dozen or so city locations, Excel had decided to simply "unload" all fifteen members of its smaller street team in Union Square. Meanwhile Excel's theft of Capital Edge's megaphones also appeared to be quite effective, allowing the team's workers to more easily attract attention to themselves. Carolyn Kepcher also shared Felisha's previously stated concerns that the public wasn't responding to the team's wrapped carriages, calling the appearance of their Shania signs "not so great" and "embarrassing."

When the candidates gathered in the boardroom, it turned out that despite the fact that Capital Edge had featured a much smaller street team that also didn't have the benefit of megaphones, Capital Edge had only lost the task by five telephone calls, 978 to 973. As their reward, Randal and Rebecca received the opportunity to go horseback riding and eat dinner with Shania Twain herself.

In Capital Edge's boardroom session, Alla and Adam attempted to blame the team's loss on Felisha. Completely ignoring the fact that Adam's carriage idea had sucked of the lion's share of their budget and that Alla had constrained her to only a $1,500 budget, Adam and Alla criticized Felisha for organizing a street team that was only a quarter the size of Excel's squad.


Although Carolyn criticized the team's decision to spend most of their budget on "horses that aren't going to speak," Felisha appeared to remain remarkably loyal to her teammates and declined to blame the horse carriages for the team's loss. Bill Rancic (once again subbing for George Ross) also criticized the team for not "thinking big" and instead focusing on only Union Square. The Donald and Bill also had no sympathy for Capital Edge's loss of their megaphones, with Bill "commending" Excel's theft of the items and Trump calling Randal and Rebecca's action "wonderful."

Feeling that Alla wasn't the reason why Capital Edge had lost the task, Trump dismissed her from the boardroom. But before she left, The Donald asked Alla for her own opinion on who he should fire, causing her to remark that "Felisha is better than Adam and... has a lot more to offer."

With Alla gone, Bill suggested firing Adam while Carolyn campaigned for Felisha's firing and noted that in her opinion, Adam and Felisha were "by far" the weakest of The Apprentice 4's five remaining contestants. In the end, although she had put up a poor defense of her performance on the staffing assignment, Trump decided that although Felisha had done a "terrible job negotiating for the temps," Adam had spent far too much of the task's budget on carriages that "looked horrible" and "were ineffective," resulting in Adam's firing.