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.

Adverts Which Influenced Ours

When we decided to plan and create an advert thats promotes an album or in our case a 'Greatest Hits' we looked at other types of adverts that have been show on television to promote other artists albums, we looked at them to find any similar concepts that are used and what kind of layout ours should have.


Robbie Williams - Greatest Hits, released in 2004

This album used a simplistic technique of showing Robbie's music videos, whilst text overlaying the clips of hit songs that Robbie had released. The music changes to represent some of Robbie's biggest hits that have been released over the years but more are revealed as text.

Advert

The album debuted at number one and was the fastest selling album upon release, selling 320,000 copies in its first week.


Steps - The Ultimate Collection, released in 2011

Another advert which helped inspire our own is the promotional advert for Steps Ultimate Collection. This album celebrated the reunion of a 90's pop band by releasing a new Greatest Hits album. This was the first alum released since their split, ten years ago. Because of the vast amount of time it had been since a previous album, the album gained a new fanbase from previous fans who have since had children. The album was released with a tour which had sold out concerts within days.

Whilst Robbie's advert was simplistic, Steps have a very brightly coloured advert, with several different music videos showing as the music changes.

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is one of America's biggest artists to date, she was the youngest paid songwriter who then went on to become a pop phenomenon. She is an American Country/Pop singer, famous for writing all her songs about personal aspects of her own life.

In 2006, Taylor Swift released her first album, self-titled 'Taylor Swift'. Since then her first album has gone on to sell over 5.5 million copies world wide.

In November 2008, Swift released her second album, titled 'Fearless', the album reached number one in the US Charts and its hit single 'Love Story' launched her release in the UK. Since its release, Fearless has gone on to sell over 9,646,311 copies worldwide. Swift recieved four Grammy Awards from this album, one of which was 'Album of the Year'. A platinum album was later released with an additional six songs. In 2009, she was named Artist of the Year by Billboard Magazine.

October 2010, Taylor Swift released her third studio album 'Speak Now' which managed to sell over One Million copies in its first week of release. Since then, the album has gone on to sell over five million copies worldwide. One of the albums singles 'Mean' was awarded 'Best Country Song' and 'Best Country Solo Performance' at the Grammy Awards in 2012, adding two more Grammy Awards to Swifts collection.

In 2009, Swift was ranked the 69th most powerful celebrity, earning over $18 million that year, she has since made her way to the 7th spot in 2011, earning $45 million. Billboard named her the most financially successful music artist of 2011.

Taylor Swift has won 102 awards since her debut in 2006, including 6 Grammy Awards, 6 Country Music Awards, 10 American Music Awards, 13 Teen Choice Awards and 13 Billboard Music Awards.

Adverts That Influenced Ours

To help create our own advert about saving energy through the use of lightbulbs, we needed to look at other adverts that were promoting similar messages. It was important for us to find adverts that were successful which would then help us make our advert successful.

In 2011, Phillips released an advert to help promote their LED lighting, this advertisement was helpful to us to outline our own advert because it has a similar style to what we had considered for our own advert. The advert is gripping for the viewer as continuous different types of lamps are turned on in the most unsual places, the use of normal characters in the advert also helps the audience connect with it.

Phillips released another advert to advertise energy efficient lighting, this advert also helped to inspire how we wanted our advert to go. This advert is much better to the previous one as there are no lightbulbs actually shown in the advert at all, the advert relies on a voiceover which details climate change and facts regarding this that the average viewer may not have known. This factor of the advert inspired our own with the idea of telling the audience 'hard-hitting facts' about the consequences of global warming and energy consumption.

LED

LED is another type of lightbulb that could be used to help conserve energy. LED stands for 'light emitting diode'. LED's are used as indicator lamps in several devices and are also used for other types of lighting.

LED's were introduced in 1962 , when they were first introduced LED's only emitted red light which was a low intensity but as society has evolved, LED's have now modernised and are available with very high brightnesses.

There are many advantages to using a LED instead of a incandescent lamp, the main advantage is that LED's have a much lower energy consumption, they are also have a longer life-span compared to IL's and come in a smaller size then IL's.

However, LED's that are powerful enough to light a room can be expensive and requre a precise current and heat management than CFL's output. 

Compact Fluorescent Lamp

There are several names the Compact Fluorescent Lamp is known as, some of these include; Compact Fluorescent Light, Energy Saving Light and Compact Fluorescent Tube, this kind of lamp is designed to replace a Incandescent Lamp.

CFL's use less power than the general Incandsecent Lamps and also are known to have anywhere from eight times to fifteen times longer life span then IL's.

CFL's are known to be more expensive to buy then IL's but it has been researched that CFL's can save over five times the amount that has been paid for in electricity costs of the CFL's lifespan. CFL's do contain mercury which makes the lamps more complicated to dispose of, in some countries, recycling schemes have been put into place to dispose of CFL's for the consumer.

Energy Efficient;

50-70% of the total amount of lights sold are incandescent lamps, due to their high efficiency, CFL's use only a quarter to one third of the power that is equivalent in incadescendent lamps.
Replacing all inefficient lighting could save up to 409 terrawat hours (TWh)  a year which counts for 2.5% of the world's electricity consumption. It is estimated, that if all the incadescent lights were replaced by CFL's in America then 80 TWh would be saved yearly.

Since CFL's use far less energy then Icandescent Lamps do, replacing all IL's would result in less CO2 being released into the atmosphere, replacing these with CFL's would globally would result in a 230 million tones CO2 reduction.

This chart shows the cost of electricity usage of several different types of lightbulbs. The chart shows clearly that Incandescent cost far more than any other type.

Cost;

When Incandescent Lamps are replaced in commercial building, CFL's can be very cost-effective, when they are used to replace IL's. In 2006 in the US, it was found that when replacing each 75 W Incandescent Lamp with a CFl resulted in a yearly save of $22 of energy consumption. When using CFL's, savings are greater and payback periods are shorter.

So Why Should We Use Energy Saving Lightbulbs?

Energy Saving Lightbulbs biggest selling point is the fact that they are cheaper and last longer. Another selling point is, energy saving lightbulbs are much more friendly to the the environment. The biggest waste from regular lightbulbs is carbon dioxide, which in turn, is the biggest contributing factor to global warming. Nearly 25% of the UK's carbon emissions come from domestic household products.

By using Energy Saving Lightbulbs, we can continue to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere, resulting in a reduction of global warming.

Visit ecofriendlylightbulbs.co.uk for more information.

Energy Conservation

We chose for our product to advertise to be Energy Saving Lightbulbs, because of this we needed to do some energy into the importance of saving energy, especially in this day and age where the energy we are using is causing damage to the Earth.

As society continues to change and it improve its technology, the amount of electricity generated is a huge amount which requires more energy to be used. The power used to generate technology products is usually generated in Power Plants that convert different kinds of energy into electricity.

Energy conservation attempts to reduce the amount of energy that is consumed. Conservation can be achieved by increasing the efficient use of energy, when there is reduced energy consumption, this reduces the energy consumption from other energy sources.

The overall result of energy conservation could be an increase of financial capital, environmental quality, national security, personal security and human comfort. Organisations and Individuals can choose to conserve energy to reduce energy costs and increase economic security, whilst Industrical and Commercial users of energy, could increase efficiency of energy to increase profit.

Energy conservation has been recieving more attention as the years progress in the UK, this is due to the Government's commitment to reducing carbon emissions, the project 'Energy Gap' in UK electricity generation and the reliance the country has on imports that meet energy needs, nationally. The highest problems for amounts of energy being consumed comes from domestic housing and road transport.