MH - Evaluation Part Two:

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The brief was to create an advertisement to promote the album of the band that our music video was made for.

• We set out to design an image that made the genre of the band apparent, whilst giving the boyband an image that would appeal to the target audience and influence people to buy the album.
  
• We originally chose to design and advertisement to take up half of a page in a teenage girl’s magazine such as ‘Disney Girl’ & ‘Total Girl’. These magazines are primarily the most effective in advertising a band such as JLS as teenage girls are the target audience.
  

• We decided to each produce a version of the advert and how we each thought it should look and then decide what version was better and develop it further.
  
  Heres My attempt:

Heres Jack's Attempt:



Heres Jonny's attempt:

• As you can see, mine and jacks idea, although following all of the typical conventions of our genre, struggle to create an interesting image for the viewer. this is a vital part of an advert because if the image is not appealing, it will not get as much attention.

• However although jonny's attempt in some ways challenges the expected look of a boyband advertisement in the way that it is animated, it is different and postmodern in the sense that there is no photo of the band, only drawn images. so in the light that jonnys advert is more effective to an audeience, we decided to develop his idea and use drawn images in our advertisemenet.

• However, the look of the advertisement, is not one that you would expect to find in a teenage girls magazine. and although this was primarily our target audeience, we had to re-evaluate what magazine should host our advert and what audience this advert would reach out to.

• The types of magazines we came up with was the type that reached out to young males, and due to the origin and nature of our band, it would probabaly be in a more urban, hip-hop magazine. One example is 'The Source' and possibly 'NME'.
  

• Richard Dyer was an american critcial theorist who talked about the importance of images in media. His concepts are relative to our advertisement as there is emphasis on star image throughout our art work.

• Dyer expressed the vitality of aesthetics throughout advertisement to portray the product or band in a certain way. for example in typical boyband advertisements, a band image is presented to give the audience an immediate view of the band or product being advertised.

• A boyband advert should consist of meat shots, close ups of the band memebers' face to fully present the cult of youth & beauty and introduce the 1st person mode of address to make the audience feel like the band is connecting with them and so they feel relative to them.

• Dyer also talked about the star image. which in this case would be that these young middle class men, have been turned into stars and displayed through advertising as these completely different people to who they really are, to sell a product or promote the band.

• Dyer claimed, the reason that images in the media are open to repeatability and the audience want to look at them is due to the ordinary and extra-ordinary factors of these products. the way that the audience can feel like the star's in the images are just like themselves, however there is an additional factor which is extra-ordinary about them. this could be the lighting, make up, and effects applied to the images to make them appear extra-ordinary.

• we challenged this expectation ultimately, as we did not use a photograph of the band but used an animated image so there was no meat shots or mode of adress only an image of the three boyband members to promote the band in a more urban way to reach out to the young males and females into R&B or hip hop music.

• it could be argued that this is a form of advertisiing the band in the way that the image is reaching out to a working class or deprived audience in London or urban areas, so that the band can be an inspiration to the audience as three young men from London themsleves, into stardom.

• The Digipack, was relative to the advertisement. we decided to go for an animation feel, to confrom to the urban animated feeling to our products. However each of our products (The Video, The Advertisement & The digipack design) are all undoubtedly connected in the following ways:
  
  • Each product displays all three of the band members
  • Each product conforms to our urban feel, whilst avoiding the gritty, violent and dark side of London City and so each product is suitable for all ages.
  • If you apply Dyers critical framework, each product represents the band as star images.