Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?


We knew from the start that the only way we could effectively market our artist was for there to be synergy between the main product, the video, and the ancillary texts, the album cover and website. We therefore aimed for a consistent brand, theme and style so that the combination of the products would be effective. This was aided by the group discussion on the creation of our artist in the first place. When we came up with the artist we also designated them a style and theme which included colours, attitudes and lifestyles of our three characters and them as a group which helped us later on in the project when thinking of colours and themes for each of the tasks.

Colour


The predominant colours of our universal marketing campaign were red, black, white and dark blue. We kept these colours consistent in our video, website and album cover so that they would be directly identified with the band if an audience member was to be asked. Colour was also the name and image of our DJ's, 'Red' and 'Black' and the colour made them what they are. The contrast between the red and the blue/black on thier mask`s creates arguments over which of the DJ's images is best from an audience perspective and from feedback on photographs unpredicted debate was caused with our class.

Video

Website

Album cover

The masks are the thing that draws the entire campaign together being visually interesting. They give our artists thier character and image and create a brand image also which an audience will immediatly relate to and debate over. In future campaigns if we were to continue this project then we would exploit the mask ideo further possibly creating a logo with the masks involved.

You can make presumptions about the characters and lifestyles of the masked DJ's simply from thier mask colour.

Synergy

There is a lot of synergy with other media in our project in order to increase the reach of our campaign. One example is the links to Spotify and iTunes on our website.  These sites create a grate platform for music sharing and are the place to go if o ne wishes to discover new music.

iTunes

Our entire project is linked together by our record label and institutional information which appears on the website and the back of the album cover. Also a great way that the album cover and the website link is the QR code on the back of the album cover. If scanned by a mobile smartphone this will take one emidiatly to our website. This actually works if it is tried as we generated a QR code for our site on the internet. Alsot on the back of the album cover are URLs for our website and record label site.

There is also symbiotic relationship within our project. We made an agreement with another group that due to the nature of our artist we would likely be scene in concert together. We therefore came up with an event at the Camden roundhouse with there artist 'The Storm' that would be a concert that would pitch both artists head to head in a sound clash. This would help to promote both artists and also make money for them from ticket sales. We produced a poster that both groups used to promote ourselves on our respective websites and here is the poster:

We found that a great way to push forward a good marketing campaign was to create ways for the audience to interact with the band. We did this by attaching our site to as many social networking sites as possible, creating real accounts for facebook, youtube and twitter and having live links between them and the site.

Another oppertunity for ineraction on our site is through the working forum where viewers of the website can comment and discuss relevant things about the artist such as tickets for concerts, which DJ they perfer and what they feel about Influx.

The marketing campaign remake competition is anothe great way for people to interact with the band. The idea behind the competion is that entrys would download sound effects from our song 'Promises' from Soundcloud and use them to remix the song. This allows them to get into the music more and aspire to be like the band. The winners would have there remix released on a seperate album 'Promises - EP' and get to meet with the grou  personally.

Overview:

The website acts as a hub for the entire marketing campaign as it promotes the artist, the single, the music video, the album, and the shop in one bit package. It incorperates all the branding, imagery and institution found in the other media texts and makes it interactive and visually interesting.

The album uses the same images, colours, and logos as the website and the same costumes as the music video. It has an interesting and contemporary style with brush effects, a lens flare and abstract imagery on the inside cover behind the DJ's which aims to draw the eye and create interest to a shopper who is to notice the album.

The video follows the themes of both the album and the website with the same colours and styles. It also puts movement to the music and promotes the characteristics of the artist and gives them a background image. The audience can be inspired by the video and aspire to the artist.

Conclusion:

We learnt a lot in order to produce our univesal campaign from other media texts and institutions. From this I believe we have created a well rounded advertising campaign which should potentialy work if the product was real. The success of the campaign will be down to it reach and the number of people who view our media product. In order to increase the reach of our campaign we would need to do indorsements in shops and try to spread as much word of mouth as possible through social networking sites which would demand planning and tactics in order to work.