Wade Armstrong

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American Inventor: Episode 12 Recap

Posted Saturday May 13, 2006 in Entrepreneurship

So this was it — the final, climactic episode, featuring our last idea of who the American Inventor is, what his (in this case) invention is, and their last chance to pitch us. Either that, or this show was one big commercial for advertising company DDB Worldwide. Also, somebody named Matt Gallant spent a lot of time on stage despite having not been relevant earlier in the season. Finally, this week’s installment seemed to be about being a creative director, not about being an American Inventor. But, apart from that, they really nailed it.

Our last four contestants — Eric Thompson with The Catch, a football training tool; Francisco Patino with the D-Tract 2×2 two-seater bike; Ed Hall with the Word Ace educational toy; and Janusz Liberkowski with his Anecia Survival Capsule car seat — all got to sit down with what I hope was not DDB’s A team and plan out their own thirty second ad with which to introduce their product. We also got to see yet another special on each of the potential American Inventors at home. Now, don’t get me wrong, building characters is important on TV, but who remembers Edison for his home life?

Worse, the content we got was just more of the same that we’d seen in earlier episodes. I would have been excited to learn more about the contestants, about their thoughts about being an inventor, about how they balanced work and life, about their plans and dreams, about how they worked and how they’d developed their products, but we didn’t learn anything about that. In fact, we’ve learned so little about Janusz throughout this show that I can only assume that he’s a very successful person who has so much money that the producers are hiding his background for fear that any working-class American would vote against him just to keep the rich from getting richer.

After we were done with the same old sob story, we got to see the ads. Each of the four contestants of course had a challenge on the way to making their ads, but, fortunately, all of the ads got made. Eric’s ad for The Catch looked solid and should resonate visually with the target but didn’t really show off the product. Francisco showed real leadership — or prima donna-ship — in enforcing his will on his ad for the D-Tract, but he also ended up with a concept that should hit the target market well despite some weaknesses. Ed had a wonderful commercial that really showed the Word Ace becoming a regular part of life and enhancing everyone’s vocabulary.

Up to this point, the DDB creatives had employed what looked the fairly standard tactic of coming up with one idea that was wonderful and one deeply awful idea, so that the customer could feel like they were making a choice in selecting the good idea, but, for Janusz’s car seat, DDB delivered two real stinkers. Janusz was forced to come up with his own idea. Even though the final look was cheesy, the ad worked.

In the end, I’m not sure who should win. Janusz and Eric have great products with social import, but I fear that nobody will buy an educational game (sorry, Leapfrog), and I really haven’t seen any doctors say “yes, Janusz’s survival capsule is better than a car seat for an infant,” which I want to hear before I say that his idea is commercially viable at all. Eric has a great product, but it’s very narrow-market — he can be successful selling his product, but The Catch just seems too small to be the next American Invention. So perhaps that leaves the D-Tract, a solid entry into a booming worldwide market and one made by the ultimate American, an immigrant. That’s who I called in my vote for, but I predict a victory for, strangely enough, the Word Ace.

However it ends, socially aware products make up half of our finalists, while there is only one home sports doo-dad, a class of which there were so many entrants at the beginning. The clear message is that socially positive product development is the wave of the future, and sports inventors need to look to Guthy-Renker, not network TV contests, to get out there. And while our group may be completely male, it is also 100% non-dominant white power structure. With current demographic trends clearly showing that this country will become a “majority minority” country someday, our finalists really do show us the next American Inventor.