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.
