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.