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

I think that the combination of our main product and ancillary texts is on the whole very effective, because artist identity is established and there is strong synergy running throughout. We have a fully integrated cross-platform campaign, which is incredibly important for artists today. As well as this, all of these platforms work together to construct the brand consistently and synergetically. The main artist images we wanted to get across throughout the whole of our marketing campaign are the band as a new indie break through artist, and the lead singer as over-the-top and uncontrollable; overshadowing the rest of the band completely.  However, I believe that there is definite room for improvement within all three products. 

We took influence from bands such as Blondie, Florence and the Machine, and Ian Dury and The Blockheads, who all have a very strong lead. 

From left to right: Ian Dury performing, a Florence and the Machine
 Promoshot, and a crop from a Blondie album cover

It was very difficult to find girl bands similar to ours, as it is unconventional for all instrument playing band members to be women. For this reason, I researched Beyonce's marketing campaign, as she is also a strong female artist. 

Beyonce's Marketing Campaign

A selection of stills from 4 of her
new music videos

Beyonce recently released a fifth, self-entitled album: Beyonce. This album was secretly produced in order for a surprise release, and by not being at all leaked, massive buzz was suddenly generated and the entire campaign went viral. 

The album has been referred to as her visual album, as there are 17 videos for just 14 songs. The medium of music videos has been used to promote the album, which give considerable insight into the messages intended behind the music and the lyrics of this secret album. Furthermore, Beyonce has used this shock and buzz generated to help to enforce her new branding as a "modern day feminist" and subsequently the album as a feminist album. 

The campaign effectively plays on the audience's needs and wants; 30 second teasers are available for every video, but the whole song must be purchase from iTunes, the links of which are on the website. The record company have made sure that there are very few leaks or illegal downloads available, and the songs are not even available on Spotify. This maximises buzz as well as profits. In this way, the website becomes the hub of the campaign, and generates much more traffic that it may otherwise do. By drawing audiences to the website, they can then attract them with other social media links, content and teasers. 

Influences that we have taken from Beyonce's campaign:

• Establishing artist identity must be constant and evolving and most importantly clear to audiences throughout any marketing campaign
• Teasers work effectively for identifying which audiences your artist appeals to. Our website now automatically plays a 30 second sound clip of the single we created the music video to, encouraging audiences to pre-order to album. 
• Music videos can generate buzz, if they present questions to audiences and make them want to continue either listening to the song or album, or interacting with the campaign. We have tried to do this with our video; it is a concept video and we have purposely left many questions unanswered and many different interpretations possible, in the hope that this encourages audiences to go further than just watch the video, but to buy the single, and buy the album. 
• The website must be very strongly linked to the campaign, and whilst the music videos have less of a link, all three must work in synergy to create and reinforce artist image.

Our Marketing Campaign (in chronological order)

Logo

This was the first stage of creating our artist image, and something that we knew would be used throughout our marketing campaign, and so we took great care in creating our band logo. We wanted to stray away from girly pop connotations to really emphasize the indie nature of or band, and so decided to go for and urban and edgy logo. Our initial idea was simply "warped grafitti".  However, this looked dull and so we decided to shape it into a circle, as this would fit in our bass drum anyway. To give the logo more depth, we used a dinosaur clipping mask on the text to add depth to the image, in a subtle way. We finally added a circle around the logo and erased some of the text to make the it more cool and edgy. 

This is the final logo.

Facebook Page

After this we created a Facebook page, so that the small audience who had heard of the band by word of mouth could be kept interested and engaged. We posted teasers on our page along with updates as to what the audience could look forward to in the future and when, along with what stages of production we were at. 

See the full page at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Chaos-Killed-the-Dinosaurs/412357298891700?fref=ts

Facebook was very important for our demographic of 15-45 year olds (combined primary and secondary target audiences).  48% of 18-24 year olds check Facebook as soon as they wake up. This age group are the most prolific users of the social networking site and a key segment of of target audience. Furthermore, the 35 years + audience is rapidly expanding and now makes up 30% of the entire database. This means that Facebook was a very effective tool for reaching our audience. 

This is our "official" band Facebook page. (click to enlarge)

Our facebook page also had links to twitter and instagram and the website. 

Twitter Page

Twitter again was a very important platform for us as the most rapidly growing social network. We used our twitter page for similar reasons to Facebook. Our twitter account was not our artists tweeting, but rather as the record label tweeting on behalf of the band. We did this to try and maintain the anonymous and enigmatic nature of the unnamed lead singer. Again, we had links to Instagram, Facebook and the website from here. 

See the full page at: https://twitter.com/CKDofficial

We then went on to make our website, album cover and music video. Below I have discussed how well these work individually and synergistically as part of our marketing campaign. 

Website

Album Cover

Music Video Screening

In order to get feedback and to finally showcase our music videos, we organised a screening for them. To raise awareness of this I made a Facebook event. 

After this we released this the teaser trailer that I and two others made to the event and on YouTube, as well as on my own social media pages. This raised some buzz about the event and encouraged people to come. 

We then made the following teaser posters, and put these up around school. 

Synergy (& release dates)

One of the main reasons for why I think that the establishing of our artist identity was successful is due to the synergy across the different products and platforms. For instance, the logo, which connotes us as and urban and edgy, indie band, is synergetically featured across most media.

Synergy and Links Between Social Media 

This video shows all of the social media used for our marketing campaign, and how they cross -link together. 



Combination of Products

Whilst our music video strongly relays the images associated with artist identity, it is a stand alone product from the website and album cover who link together closely - this is very conventional because websites are often based on the album cover. An example of a campaign that has done this is Lady Gaga's. 

There are still links through all of our products though. For example, the band colours of black and red run throughout all texts, but the website and album cover focus more on a white and red/purple theme, due to the design and styling of the album. The diagram below shows the synergy between the album and the website. 

With all of our products, we have marketed Arianna more than the rest of the band. Furthermore, she does everything slightly different to them, such as wearing a red dress when they are in black, or having sequins on her face as well as glitter. Her overshadowing and dominance is also clear from the music video, the majority of shots feature the whole band or just her, with the occasional single shot of the musicians included for the fans that want to get a better knowledge of each members individual personality. Whilst I think that this message is clear, I think we could have gone further with this in all aspects, such as changing her hair styles to something more bold, or making her gestures wilder and crazier. I think that if we had done this it would have made our campaign more effective on the whole.