Evaluation

In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?

The 'Taylor Swift' advert that we produced has applied to many of the conventions of previous existing media products, we made sure that we managed to include as many conventions as we could as this would be vital to our adverts success.

An important part of our research was to discover the best way to be able to connect Taylor Swift to her fans and gain their attention, from the research we carried out, we really needed to decide what was the best way to reach her main audience but we also wanted to grab the attention of an older audience and make our advert appeal to those who may not have given much attention to product to begin with. Because this is what we wanted to achieve, we felt that we should include as much differently styled songs by Taylor as we could, to show her diversity, this would also include our takes on what her music videos could look like. Any established fan of Taylor would immediately recognise the music and the music videos and therefore want the latest 'Taylor Swift' product.

On the whole, our target audience are those who are already 'Taylor Swift' fans as the product we are trying to promote is a 'Greatest Hits' album, however this could also bring in those who are Taylor fans but have not bought any of her albums as some people choose to wait for one album which features all the hits, such as a 'Greatest Hits' album. As well as showing some of Taylor's biggest hits and some clips from her music videos, we also chose to show some facts about Taylor's popular career. By showing these facts, this may appeal to a newer audience who may be impressed by her career.

We hoped to also follow the Two Step Flow theory to gain the attention of those who have never shown an interest in Taylor's music and those who may have never heard of her previously, by using this theory, we hoped that 'word of mouth' would also help to gain some attention, though this is a much longer process.

We wanted to create something that a Taylor fan themselves would be happy to see and feel that the advert would do justice to Taylor's six year career and all that she has achieved, we wanted it to be entertaining as well as something that looks back and appreciates the past six years.



How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Tasks?

Along with our main product, our ancillary tasks needed to reflect the same enthusiasm and appreciative feel as our main advert for Taylor does. We started of by creating a couple of pages that would be featured on several websites, well known for selling media products such as 'Amazon' and 'HMV', we also created a forum, where fans of Taylor could discuss and find out more details about the 'upcoming release' of the Greatest Hits album.

For the Taylor Swift ancillary tasks by featuring the Greatest Hits album on websites such as HMV and Amazon, it also offers the chance to view other products by Taylor Swift.
We decided to create a Forum instead of a website for Taylor, partly because Taylor already had an official website but also because the use of Forums are starting to increase as fans choose to visit a Forum to discuss a new product and find out more information about this product.

 

On this forum, we created seperate threads to talk about the upcoming 'Greatest Hits' album but we also created several other topics about her other albums. We also created a 'Digi Pack' which included designing the CD itself, we decided to keep the design quite simple, though we did use the same font that Taylor Swift uses on all her albums. We chose to use some of her most recognisable and most popular songs on the album, such as; Picture to Burn, Safe and Sound and Love Story.

For our 'Energy Saving Lightbulbs', we created a logo for the product that would be featured on social networking websites and a pop up advert that would be featured on Google. Google is the most popular search engine and is used by millions, therefore by featuring the pop-up on this website, it guarantees many people seeing the advert and becoming aware of the product. Our slogan was 'Saving Energy, Saving You' which we thought would be simple, memorable and effective.

Along with the pop up advert, we also created a Facebook page and a Twitter page, our aim with this was to provide people who were already interested in the product with more information about the product.



How Did You Use Media Technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

The internet was an important part of how we carried out our research to figure out how we wanted our advert to turn out and what we wanted it to be about. By using the internet, we managed to find all the types of conventions we wanted to use in our adverts and how they have been used in previous adverts.

Watching several types of advertising videos on YouTube also helped with deciding how our advert was going to turn out, by watching successful adverts with the same aim as what we had, for example; watching Phillips Lights was a helpful advert to watch when our product was 'Energy Saving Lightbulbs' and Steps Greatest Hits was helpful when we decided to go in another direction with our Greatest Hits album.

Researching on the Internet also helped us find information about adverts and their conventions and theories as well as types of adverts and restrictions that have been placed on certain adverts.
We applied everything that we learnt from out AS year about editing, filming and lighting regarding our video and put good use to it.

By using the internet, we were also able to use social networking websites as form of promotion for our product also, by the creation of a Facebook page, a Twitter, a Forum and Pop Up Advert. By using these websites, this allowed for our product to be promoted globally and shown to a wider audience then we would have been able to have without it.



What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?

We were aware, in order to have a successful advert that we needed to gain feedback from others to discover their opinions on the advert and how well we managed to get our point across.

If we were to go in and re-edit our advert based on the opinions of others then the feedback would be very important for us to get as its their opinions that would tell us what worked and what didn't. We gathered feedback through the use of several different websites, we managed to gain mostly positive rather than negative reviews about our final advert, we gained this from friends but also people from around the world that we did not know.

However, our advert did recieve some criticisms about the style and editing of the final advert;

"We kept to the point but were repeating ourselves with the editing, not making it different and unexpected.”

However, this was the idea of our advert as we chose to keep it rather simplistic and highlight the music and the music videos of Taylor Swift.

Another criticism that was made about the advert was that the viewer was unaware throughout the advert that it was advertising a 'Greatest Hits' album until the very end of the advert. Therefore, we decided if were to re-edit the advert we would try and make it more clear from the start of the advert what product we are trying to sell, this would be through showing the album cover more than once or even using a voice over on the advert to tell the audience directly what is being promoted to them. 

Feedback for 'Greatest Hits'

Once we had uploaded our advert to YouTube, this allowed other people to see it and this also meant that we would be able to link the advert to people we know and then the chain would continue. By having more and more people view the video, it meant we could recieve more and more feedback on the advert, be it negative or positive.

To get more feedback from others, we posted the video on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Forums, this enabled us to get wider feedback, even from people we did not know.

These are some screenshots of some of the feedback we have recieved for the advert;

Taylor Swift's 'Greatest Hits' Advert

This is our final piece of our 'Taylor Swift, Greatest Hits' Advert. It shows many of the conventions in this advert that manage to make an advert successful, such as; the advert is easy to be memorable and the information given in the advert is easy to understand, some of the songs featured on the album are clearly stated in the advert.




Whilst researching for similar adverts to our idea, we discovered recurring patterns beginning to crop up, many adverts had a similar feel to the one we had wanted for ours, we had montages of 'Taylor Swift Music Videos', we have both close ups of 'Taylor Swift' in our advert and also other clips where Taylor is not featured as the main subject.

This one minute advert would be the advert that would be shown on television for several weeks, it would be shown at prime television times, we could aim to show this advert at all times of the day since Taylor has a wide age range of an audience and this would allow them to realise that the product is now available.

After this advert had been on the air for several weeks, we would then change our advert to a shorter version, this would save time and money as we would be showing a shorter advert and taking up less advertising space. Both adverts would also be available for viewing on YouTube and there would also be the Forum we created for fans to talk and discuss the product.

Energy Saving Lightbulb Advert

This is our completed advert for our 'Energy Saving Lightbulb' product;




After completion of this advert, we decided that we didnt think the advert was strong enough for Media A2 Standards, we felt we could use the media skills that we had learned much more creatively, so we decided to plan a different and better advert instead.

Two Step Flow

The Hypodermic Needle Model was proved to "clumsy" for media researchers who were seeking more of a precise explanation about the relationship between the audience and the text.

As mass media began to expand and become more of an essential to life, those around the world did not become reduced to a mass of 'unthinking drones'.

Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudlet believed that audiences were 'opinion leaders' who then communicate to less active associates who they may have influenced. The audience then mediate the information they have recieved from the media and then the information is expressed by opinion leaders. Not being influenced by directly, creates a Two Step Flow.

This allowes researchers to realise that social factors are also very important to how audiences interpret the texts.

The Two Step Flow is what we wanted to achieve through our 'Energy Saving Lightbulb' advert, we hoped the end result would be word of mouth as well as the advert itself, reaching a younger generation.

Uses and Gratifications

In 1948, Lasswell suggest that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society;

- Correlation

- Entertainment

- Surveillance

- Cultural Transmissions

In 1974, Bulmer and Katz, expanded Lasswell's theory by suggesting that individuals may choose and use a text for the following purposes;

- Diversion; escape from everyday problems and routines.

- Personal Relationships; using media for emotional and other interactions e.g. substituting soap operas for family life.

-  Personal Identity; finding yourself reflected in texts and learning behaviour and values from these texts.

- Surveillance; information which could be useful for living e.g. weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains.

We want people to watch our 'Energy Saving Lightbulbs' advert because it is beneficial to them and it enables them to realise the importance it is to buy this product to allow themselves a sustainable future.

The Hypodermic Needle Model

This model was created in 1920 is a theory that explains how mass audience may react to mass media. This model suggests that audiences recieve the information through a media text, the audience does this without an attempt to process or challenge the text.

The model also suggests the experience, the intelligence and opinions of an individual have no effect on how the audience percieves the text.

However, this does not apply to the both of our adverts, we want the audience to be able to identify with both the 'Energy Saving Lightbulb' advert and the 'Taylor Swift Greatest Hits' advert. One advert gives out a very important message regarding the need to save the environment and the other is important to Taylor Swift fans.  

Reception Theory

By using the concept of an 'active' audience, work was needed to be done for the audience to be able to recognise and interpret a text, this would show how features such as age, class, gender and ethnicity affected their interpretations.

This was based on Stuart Hall's creation 'the enoding/decoding' model which is about the relationship between audience and text. The text is encoded by the producer and decoded by the audience.

Encoding and Decoding Model

Using recognised codes and conventions, drawing upon audience expectations to aspects such as genres and the use of ‘celebrities’, the producer can control the audience and create an amount of ‘agreement’ on the codes meaning.

By using Reception theory, we are able to plan out and decide what would make the perfect 'Taylor Swift Greatest Hits' advert because our main audience we want to appeal to are those who are already her fans.

Anicllary Task - Digi Pack

Taylor Swift 'Greatest Hits'

In order to promote Taylor's album, we needed to create the album itself, this would include the front cover, the back cover, the CD and a preview of the booklet that would come inside of the album.

When we were choosing how to design the album cover, we wanted something that was simple and rather girly, as this is Taylor's image herself. We used photographs on the back cover, this would relate back to our advert as it is similar to what we shot for the music video Fearless.

Front Cover;

Back Cover;

The CD;

Preview of the 'Booklet';

We added on the logo 'Big Machine Records' because this is the actual record label that Taylor Swift is signed to.

Pitch - Taylor Swift Advert

Before we could plan what kind of advert we wanted to have, we needed to know who Taylor Swift's target audience was, who buys her albums, so we could plan who our advert could appeal more to.

We discovered that 63% of Taylor Swift's target audience was female, whilst 37% were males, the reason for the higher percentage in females is most likely because Taylor sings very much about romance which appeals more to a female audience.

We also found that the target age of the audience for Taylor Swift was around the ages of 18 - 24 year olds, this is likely to be that this is the similar age to Taylor and therefore a stronger connection is likely to be made.

Pitch - Energy Saving Lightbulbs

To know who was our target audience for our energy saving lightbulb product, we needed to carry out reseearch to discover who would be watching and who was more likely to buy the product.

We found that our target age for the audience was consumers over the age of 30 because these are the people who take care of a household and change the lightbulbs ect. However, we also wanted our advert to appeal to a younger audience, as the need to save energy effects them also.

So, we decided to choose a relevant song that our younger audience may recognise, we decided on My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade.

Demographics

When we were planning our advert, we needed to know who was Taylor Swift's main audience and who she targeted the most. By knowing this information, we would be able to advertise the product for a particular audience. We found out that Taylor Swift's audience is 63% female and 37% male. This meant that the advert could target more to the female fanbase than the males, since they are the larger group.

We also found out what age was the larger group and who we should target the advert more to demographically, we found that Taylor Swift's fanbase was largely between the ages of 18 and 24 year olds.

This is mostly due to the majority of the topics that Taylor's music is based on, such as;

- Falling In Love
- Heartbreak
- Growing Up

Many of Taylor's songs are inspired by her own real life relationships.

All information is found at www.quantcast.com/taylorswift.com

Ancillary Task - Forum

We decided to come up with the idea of using a forum as a way to gather people to talk about the 'upcoming release' of Taylor Swift's Greatest Hits, we decided on a forum instead of a website because Taylor Swift already has a official one. Forums are often used for people to talk about their interests in films, music etc with other people. They often link others to articles or videos on YouTube about their chosen topic.

We thought it may be a good idea for us to create a forum specifically for Taylor Swift, this way fans can gather to talk and discuss all things Taylor Swift. We decided on designing different categories for the fans. One is General Board, this is where fans would post anything that is related to Taylor. Another is about Taylor's acting career, Taylor has acted in a few small projects, which there is a seperate thread for each. A third is of course Taylor's Music Career, here there is each a board to discuss each album of Taylor's, including the Greatest Hits album.

Inside the section of 'Taylor Swift's Greatest Hits' there are already several topics about the album, such as the released tracklisting and the cover art. The Forum has been made available for any member of the forum to post anything they wish relating to the new album. This could be a link to an article written about the release or the cover art etc.

There is also a comment feature on the forum, this allows other fans to gather and discuss about their thoughts and opinions on Taylor's new music or anything topic-worthy.

Here is a link to the forum we have created: Taylor Swift Forum

Though fans would have to log in to the forum or make an account to access the information or make a post themselves, by searching for the forum through a search engine, it allows fans to find it easier, the forum would also be advertised on Taylor Swift's official website.

Searching:

Website Link:

CD Cover

We needed to design a CD cover to show in the advert, as this is a common feature of promotions for album adverts. This is the CD cover we created for our Greatest Hits album, we wanted to keep the cover simplistic and show a picture of Taylor Swift so consumers would be able to recognise her instantly and want to buy the product.

The font we used on the cover is the same font that Taylor Swift uses as her signature, the same font is used on all her albums, we decided to use this on our own as it would be another thing recognised by fans of Taylor's.

Ancillary Task - Amazon and HMV

To help promote our CD and to help our CD be available to buy by consumers, we decided to create a page on both Amazon.co.uk and HMV.com. We chose these because both these websites are well known websites and are very popular for consumers. By doing this, we were able to show that our product is available to buy.

Amazon

HMV

Short Version - Final

Our shorter version of the advert is just over twenty seconds long and would be able to be shown on the television because it is short enough and would be cheaper to show because of its length. The shorter advert shows clips of Taylor Swift's Speak Now concert, we wanted to use this footage because we shot it ourselves by attending one of her concerts.







Because this is a shorter advert, this would allow audiences to watch this advert and be interested enough to go online and search for more information about the product. This advert allows fans to be interested through the use of personally shot concert footage, which many may have gone to see and have recognisable music playing in the background.

Ancillary Tasks - Social Networks

To promote our product in more and different ways, we created accounts on two of the biggest social networking websites 'Twitter' and 'Facebook' this allows consumers to follow our product and allow them to see the latest information about the product. Many companies also use this as a way to promote any price cuts or offers they have on the product at a certain time.

This allows media convergence to take place as both Facebook and Twitter combined have over 1 billion users. Since advertising has grown, people can now watch adverts on the television and then take to the internet to discuss the advert online. Some adverts have become viral overnight.

Twitter

Facebook

Ancillary Task - Logo

Pop-up adverts are often used to advertise products on different websites and gain attention from different audiences. Having a pop-up adverts on all sorts of different websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google allows more different types of people to see our brand that we are trying to advertise. Advertising our product on these types of websites promotes the product to a wider audience and also manages to target our target demographic.

Our target for Energy Saving Lightbulbs was mainly for the older generarion since they are the ones who buy the shopping and household items and look after the home, however we also wanted it to appeal to the younger audience as well as these are the ones who are more likely to be effected by the consequences.

For our branded light bulb, we needed to design a logo for our product. This logo would be used on the products packaging and also used to advertise the product. We also wanted to show the pop up advert if you were to type in Energy Saving Lightbulbs into a search engine.

Planning our Short Advert Version

As our main advertisement was just over a minute long, we decided to create a much shorter version also, we wanted this advert to be slightly different to the longer version, instead of showing footage of music videos, we instead decided to show footage of one of Taylor Swift's concerts which we filmed ourselves. The concert itself was a part of the 'Speak Now' tour which had a total of 89 shows and grossed over $100 million.

The idea for our shorter version of the advert came from Robbie Williams Greatest Hits Advert, though his advert shows his music videos and ours shows concert footage, his advert inspired us to use the idea of song titles that are featured on the album to be shown on the advert. For Example, we planned to have the songs 'Teadrops on my Guitar' and 'Picture to Burn' featured on the album and therefore had those song titles featured on the advert.

Several of the shots we included in the advert included footage from these performances from Taylor Swift which we filmed by attending one of her concerts;

Sparks Fly and Speak Now

Reasons for the Choice of Song

To make sure our advert was promoting Taylor Swift's 'Greatest Hits' we had to make sure we had plenty of Taylor Swift's music in the advert. We needed to choose songs that would be well known by the audience, using her biggest hits but we also needed to use different songs that give off a different vibe, for example, not all the songs in the advert would be angry or sad.


Teardrops on my Guitar

When we decided to use the song 'Teardrops on my Guitar' which was Taylor Swift's second ever released single, we wanted to show a personal song-writer side to the video as Taylor Swift has been open about how personal this song is to her as she directly names the person she writing about.

To attempt to show this, we had our protagonists write down the lyrics to the song as if she was writing it herself whilst also playing it on the guitar, we tried to show the process of writing a new song and trying to come up with the chords for the song as Taylor would have done. However, since writing songs can be very difficult we showed the protagonist ripping up her song to show that it was not saying what she wanted to say.

Never Grow Up

Because this song is about a young girl growing up, we wanted to show our protagonist doing innocent and childish things such as reading a book in her pyjamas and getting into bed, to portray the innocence of the song.

We also showed shots of the protagonists 'make up and perfume' table to show that she is in fact growing up, as it is often shown that as young girls get older they start to use these products, this was used to create a nostalgic feeling.

Picture to Burn

This song is very much about being angry about a break up so we took the lyrics of the song literally and decided to show our protagonist burning a picture of the 'ex-boyfriend' despite the fact that Taylor Swift doesn't actually do this in her own music video for the song. When our protagonists finds a picture of her 'ex-boyfriend' we showed her burning the edges of the photo to make sure it looked genuine.

To make sure we had the right angle, we shot it several times and chose which one looked best.

Mean

Mean has a very small part in our advertisment for Taylor Swift's Greatest Hits and is only featured briefly but we decided to use the most well known part of the song 'why you gotta be so mean?'. We chose this line as it showed what the song was about without the need to listen to it as a whole.

Fearless

This song is very much about not being scared about anything and living life carefree so we wanted to show this by using lots of different clips of our protagonist playing around, running, climbing trees and generally messing around with the camera.

Since Taylor's music video doesn't reference the song in anyway, the video is used as a way to promote and show Taylor's 'Fearless' tour, ours is still similar to this as we dont show anyone singing the song or have a distinct storyline, we just feature a different types of clips.

Wardrobe

To show that the music videos were different from one another, we had several costume changes, these included casual clothing, to pyjamas and also a formal dress. Each outfit was picked to reflect what the song was about and the mood it had.

For the music video's 'Mean' and 'Picture to Burn', we had our protagonist wear a formal dress, we chose this as we hoped it would show a softer side to her in an angry song.

For 'Never Grow Up' the video is set in the protagonists bedroom, so we decided to have her relaxed and dressed in her pyjamas, we also hoped that this projected more of a softer side to her and a childlike image which reflects a song that is all about growing up.

Preparing for our Advert

We decided that in our Taylor Swift advert that we wanted to have a montage of Taylor Swift's music videos, filmed by us as if promoting her biggest hits. As a group, we chose our favourite songs recorded by Taylor and decided what we wanted our storyline to be in the video, though we knew we were only going to show a small part. Each video we shot, we planned out first by drawing storyboards.

'Picture to Burn'

'Never Grow Up'

As an example of this, for one of the songs we chose to use 'Picture to Burn' we decided to have our protagonist burn a picture of a boy she liked, suggesting that he had hurt her.

Whilst we were filming 'Picture to Burn' we had to have several copies of the same picture, as we had several attempts to burn it, trying different angles each time.

When we were planning to film for another chosen song 'Teardrops on my Guitar', we wanted to show a personal side to the video, such as our protagonist writing the lyrics down on a notepad whilst playing her guitar. We decided on this idea because Taylor Swift herself is very personal with her own music, she writes about breakups that she has experienced and 'Teardrops on my Guitar' is an example of this.

For 'Never Grow Up' we wanted to have a childish feel to it but also nostalgic to those who have already grown up but remember their childhood, we had our protagonist reading a book and dressed in pyjamas as we wanted to convey a childlike and innocent look as the song is about innocence and growing up.

We decided to use the song 'Mean' because Taylor Swift has one several awards for this song recently, we decided to keep the clip for 'Mean' only short as we wanted to get the quick tagline 'why you gotta be so mean?' into the video. We designed the words on the computer, so we could move them around however we wanted.

Advertising Taylor Swift's 'Greatest Hits' [2]

We came up with the idea to promote the American Country singer Taylor Swift's 'Greatest Hits' album, a product that we came up with ourselves. Because the both of us are such huge Taylor Swift fans, we loved the idea of our advert idea including her and the use of her music.

The idea of our advert was to show several of Taylor Swift's 'Music Videos', which we filmed ourselves, some of the songs we used had music videos by Taylor Swift, some of them did not, in the longer version advert, we then planned to have facts about Taylor Swift's successful career.

Since Taylor Swift does not have a 'Greatest Hits' album out in stores already, we designed our own cover for one which we planned to promote at the end of the advert.

These are Taylor Swift's currently existing albums;

2006 - Self-titled 'Taylor Swift'

2008 - Fearless

2010 - Speak Now

Slow Motion

We wanted to give our Energy-Saving Lightbulb advert a dramatic ending so we decided on throwing a lightbulb at the ground, hoping it would smash. We also thought this would be a lot more effective in slow motion.

We thought this would look theatrical and send out a message to our audience, we decided to use a normal light bulb because we thought it would be a good metaphor, as a way to say 'dispose of these light bulbs' and promote the use of energy saving ones.

(Skip to 0.08)

Preparing For Our Advert

We decided to film our Energy Saving Lightbulb advert is several different locations, including our own homes and our school. We planned to have a montage of lights flickering on and light switches being switched on, so for this we wanted as many different lights and switches we could find, to have a wide range.

We decided, when planning our advert that we wanted to have some sort of an impact on the audience, we thought that slowing down a lightbulb smashing into the ground may have some effect since we were promoting energy saving. To film this shot we used a Slow Motion Camera and to prepare for smashing the lightbulb, we covered the ground with a sheet to make sure to catch any broken shards of glass once the bulb was smashed.

Once we had covered the pavement with a large sheet, we practised several times throwing a stone that was similar in size, to see where it would land, we wanted to get the perfect angle whilst it broke. We also wanted the camera to be steady, whilst practising we realised the shot was not steady enough and so we made sure to prop the camera up.

This is our practice try;

This is our trial run with the lightbult, we threw it gently so that it wouldn't smash;

For health and safety reasons, we made sure that we did a thorough job when cleaning up the broken shards of glass, careful not to leave any existing pieces behind.