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.

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

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.

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.