main product and ancillary texts?
When considering the effectiveness of the combination of our main product and ancillary texts, we had to take synergy, cross media convergence, brand identity and cross media promotion into consideration. Cross media promotion would be an effective way of promoting our media product by making promotional material for the product available to audiences across a wide range of media platforms such as computers, games consoles, the Internet, and smart phones. Essentially our product has to be everywhere our audience may be. It helps our film gain a useful amount of recognition as well as maintaining the buzz created by the main product and ancillary texts. Cross media promotion effectively draws in more of our target audiences and making the products accessible across different areas maintains the audience’s interest in our film. Continuing on the subject of cross media promotion, we have to ensure that there is continuity amongst our products. Some of the ways in which we attempted to do this were by keeping our colour scheme and typography consistent across our trailer and ancillary texts.
The colours grey, black, white and red are prominent in our main product and ancillary texts, as illustrated below.
It is most effective when each media product corresponds with one another. This feature of continuity is essential in ensuring that the audience understand that products on different platforms belong together. It is also crucial in meeting our target audience’s expectations. Establishing a strong brand identity is vital in ensuring that audiences can identify that additional content and products relating to the film are available to them, this will effectively improve reception of the film upon release and also provide a positive experience of the film for the audience. Ultimately, a strong brand identity helps meet the rising expectations of film audiences. Films such as Twilight have a clear brand identity across their products. The visual style as well as typography is consistent across their media products as well as the additional content available for the film. In each film within the saga, a visual style is closely followed and the audience can clearly identify product belongs to which twilight saga film.
We have attempted to follow in the footsteps of films like the "Twilight" saga and ensure that there is clear continuity and consistency amongst our products. When assessing whether our products work well as a combination, the visual style is key in deciding this. The visual style is significant in identifying whether the combination of the products are effective, and I think in relation to our final products.
the visual style of our products is evidently consistent.
Film and Entertainment companies such as Warner Bros effectively display continuity throughout their products.
Through synergy, they created a series of products related to the film ‘The Dark Knight’, and also made the content relating to the film available across the media on a variety of platforms through cross-media convergence. These included soundtracks, video games, children’s toys and DVDs. Additional content was also available via Smartphones, Ipods, PCs and Laptops etc. Using synergy, cross media promotion, and cross media convergence, media companies such as Warner Bros were able to extend their audience’s experience of The Dark Knight.
Although synergy proved to be a successful technique by Warner Bros, creating synergy products for a horror film such as “Institution” wouldn’t be as marketable as an action film like The Dark Knight’. Synergy is useful in establishing the brand identity but as our horror is based on mental illness and 'bloody' revenge, it would be challenging to sell products based on those horror themes as opposed to films about superheroes and villains.
Considering the benefits of cross-media promotion, synergy and cross media convergence, we attempted to extend our audience’s experience of our film. Our film is featured on our magazine front cover, including behind the scenes images. Not only does this contribute to the effectiveness of the combination of our ancillary texts, but it also displays a strong form of cross media promotion and synergy as two different media products (the poster and magazine) are working together to provide an experience of our film for our audience, and our film is being promoted on different platforms.
To add, in order to provide as much additional content as possible for our audience, we produced an mock-up image of how our film would appear advertised on a bus stop or billboard.
We found that a billboard advert may be an easier way of promoting our product as it appeared to be clearer and bolder than the bus stop advert. We also found other ways to promote our film to our target audience. We found that an effective way to promote our film to our target audience would be to advertise the film on posters outside cinemas. We visited Odeon in Greenwich to see the different ways in which films are advertised at cinemas to gather information and ideas in how to cross-promote. In finding ways to do this successfully, it will ultimately better the combination of our products and raise awareness of our "Institution" brand.
Continuing with cross media promotion, other ways in which we could extend our audience's experience of our film, and help them gain more recognition of our film is by advertising it on buses (like the Drive 3D advert below) as the film is bound to gather interest as people would see the ad so frequently.
Alternatively advertising our film via radio ad would be an effective way to cross promote. This way, we are attempting to maximise our audience's experience of our film. As our target audience is young, advertising our horror film via popular radio stations amongst young people e.g 'Kiss100' would successfully extend our audience's experience of "Institution" as well as develop the 'buzz' created by our other products.
Blackberry Smart phones such as the "Blackberry Curve 8520", PCs, Laptops, and iPhones/iPods e.g. ‘Ipod Touch 4th Generation’.
By making our products available across media platforms, we were able to effectively attract our young and modern target audience and our content was easily accessible to them.
The above images display me gaining access to our teaser trailer via the 'Youtube' application on my Ipod Touch 4G. Also shown, is the view of our film poster, after being downloaded from 'Facebook' onto my Ipod. Below is a view of our feature of " Institution" on our very own "Screen Magazine" and a video displaying how easy it is to access our content on a Blackberry smart phone.
The view of our main product and ancillary texts on the Ipod Touch 4g conveys the consistency of appearance of each product. Viewers from the Ipod Touch 4g can see consistency and continuity in regards to costume, character, colour scheme, typography etc in our products. We also found that the appearance of our main products from a small hand-held device such as the Ipod Touch is still very clear, but not as clear as it would be, being viewed from a PC or Laptop. However, the availability of our final products on devices such as the Ipod Touch still allows access to our audience, and allows them to view the combination of our final products through sites such as 'Youtube' and 'Facebook' and make judgements on whether the combination of the three products are effective.
Another hand-held device from which our main product was accessible was the 'Samsung Galaxy S' Android mobile phone. Android phones are amongst the most recent developments in mobile phones. They are not only mobile phones, they are essentially mini-computers as they a wide range of uses, whether it be creating a word document, or downloading a film the Android phones can do so much. They are an excellent example of cross-media convergence, and one of the key features of these phones is the ability to gain access to the full 'Youtube' site, unlike other phones and hand-held devices only having access to the mobile site. Below is a video of the 'Samsung Galaxy S' watching our horror teaser trailer.
Strengths of the combination of our final products include the visible continuity and the easy accessibility of our products from a wide range of media platforms, as well as the recognition from our audience that the products clearly belong together. However, If we were to re-do the project, there are many ways in which we can improve the effectiveness of our three final products. One of these would be to establish a clearer brand identity and create extra products that would extend the audiences experience of our horror movie. To conclude, taking everything into consideration, the combination of our three products are considerably effective as we do have many features of continuity across our final products.
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