Arianna Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think that we used both our main product and ancillary texts effectively together to create a brand for our band. As it was the band’s debut, we needed to establish an artist identity by ensuring that our products were synergistic across our 360-degree campaign. We also needed to ensure that our indie-pop genre was made explicit.

When trying to establish our artist identity, we took a lot of inspiration from Lady Gaga. Although she is a solo artist, we has decided to focus our marketing towards the crazy and outgoing lead singer, so Lady Gaga was perfect. Above is a gif from Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' music video, which inspired our hospital set-up greatly. When looking at some of Lady Gaga's album covers, it is noticeable that they all include an extremely striking close up on the front cover to entice the audience. This also portrays an image of confidence which we wanted to replicate for our album. Lady Gaga's website has extremely evident links between her website and album, as the website is completely revolved around its imagery. There is an intial pop-up for the purchase of the album, along with constant links throughout the website, a washed-out background of the album cover and a maintained font and colour scheme.

We wanted to market our band with the lead singer as the focus. We created a memorable identity for her as crazy, powerful and dominant. Along with general attitude when performing in the music video and having more screen-time, we used colours as a means of portraying this crazy character. With our band colours being black and red, the lead singer wore a bright red dress while the others wore black in the projection set-up, instantly causing her to stand out. This styling was then carried through to the promo shoot creating a synergistic link between the video and the website where the photos were placed.  This marketing was also continued on the album, as both the front and back cover were strong individual photos of the lead singer, unconventional of debut bands which would usually like to introduce all their members.

We created a sense of enigma with our album cover. The image of the lead singer underwater and the theme of water does not give any clues to the music of the band, it was conceptual, similar to the music video. This enigma would encourage the audience to go to our website through the QR code on the back cover, which acting as the central hub for our band would provide all the answers to the questions raised. We needed to make sure the audience found their way to the website as it contained purchasing opportunities, essential for any marketing campaign. For example, tour tickets, the single, the album and branded merchandise.

As the central hub, the website contained lots of synergistic links with the music video and particularly the album cover. The website was orientated around the album cover, something we found out was a convention during our research. Both the opening page and background contain images of the letter I, the title of our album. In the gallery, there are behind the scenes photos from the music video shoot, encouraging people to watch the video, a promotional material, and then buy the single and album. This also makes the audience member feel special, as tho
ugh they are a VIP with extra information about the band. This gratifies their needs in entertainment and surveillance.

Our band logo was definitely a means of ensuring a sense of branding across all platforms. The graffiti-style font provides a clue to our genre and our band colours, red and black, are featured. The logo is featured on the drum-kit in the video and also in the top corner of every page on the website. We have also extended it to social media with our Twitter image also being the logo. Our reco
rd label, Revolutionary Records also provides as a means of creating synergy between the ancillary texts as it is features on both the album cover and at the bottom of every page on the website. We decided it would be an independent British Record Label and decided on the name during a meeting.

We wanted to truly test how effective a marketing campaign we could create, so we used a screening of the music video in school as a means of doing so. We created an event on Facebook and put up posters around school, one with band performance images and one with a still of our music video’s first shot. The posters also contained our QR code so people could have a direct link to our website. I also created a trailer with two other members of my group, it provided as a teaser for all the music videos being shown at this screening.

Improvements:

The avatar below describes an improvement which could have been made on the combination of our main product and ancillary tasks: