2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?

We hoped to create a music video that would work synergistically with our website and digipak. As Richard Dyer states, an artist is a product of a record company and needs to be packaged and sold to audiences, and we tried to do this by creating a cross-platform promotional campaign that would link the products together and establish a recognisable brand identity for our artist.

We wanted our two ancilliary texts to work together, too, to effectively brand our artist in ways that a music video can't, e.g. with the font used. The table below briefly illustrates some examples of how our digipak and website work in synergy stylistically:

- The sticky tape appears on the back cover of the digipak and frequently on the website. As well as tying these two products together, it links to the name of the band: Sticky and the Melonheads, so this image becomes associated with the band.

- The rainbow colours used for the logo on the album cover match the coloured borders and fonts used consistently on the website. The black backgrounds also match. 

- The font of our logo on the album cover is also used on the website for most of the headings and links. Using the same font consistently across platforms is done frequently when promoting an artist:

The 1975 album cover and logo on the website header (pictured below the album cover) use the same fonts

Ed Sheeran website and albums/EPs below - hand-drawn style used has been repeated across all album art and is used for the font on the website

The matching colour scheme of black and rainbow colours could mean that our ancilliary texts don't combine with our main text so effectively - the music video consists entirely of light and vibrant colours, which maybe contradicts with the black background used on the website and digipak.

The rainbow colours do extend into our music video, however. This is sometimes done with real campaigns, The 1975 being an example:

The 1975 album cover 

The 1975 website

Stills from the music video for "Chocolate", The 1975's single

Stills from music videos for "The City" and "Sex"

Richard Dyer makes the point that an artist's identity is not just restricted to their music and The 1975 demonstrate this: the image constructed in their music videos extends into their album cover and website. All these products, music video included, follow the same black-and-white colour scheme to establish The 1975's 'cool', indie-rock image.

Font used on header, captions for pictures and across The 1975's website... 

The simple, minimalist font also maintains this 'cool' indie image

Similar to The 1975, the lighting used in our music video matches the colours used for our logo on the album cover, and on the website:

Rainbow colours used for logo on digipak and website as well as images across these two products

The coloured lighting helps the audience to differentiate between the set-ups but the colours used across all three products help to construct our artist's image as a lighthearted, upbeat indie pop band.

In addition to creating a brand identity for our artist, our main and ancilliary texts work together to promote each other as well as the artist in general. For example:

We have a music video page on our website that allows the audience to watch it on the website itself - this is an example of cross-media convergence which is essential to create an effective marketing campaign

The music video page on the website could encourage the audience to purchase the band's music.

The album is promoted across the website, on the home page, store and navigation bar

On the back cover of the digipak at the bottom we also promote our website:

This means that people with the album know where to go for more information about the artist.

We also created synergy with the band's costumes:

The photo on the inside over of the digipak shows the band wearing their outfits from the music video

These outfits are also used in publicity shots featured on the website

This means that the publicity shots on the website work to promote the music video, because the band are dressed in the same outfits. The costumes link all three products together.

The characters and personalities of the band members are also consistent across the three texts. In the music video the performance is quite fun and the band don't take themselves too seriously, especially in the era scenes:

They still have moments of appearing more serious and "cool" in their performance:

Dyer states that an artist's personality is established through songs and performance, and through this they aim for immediate star identity with the first album. This is what we aimed to achieve with our music video. 

Extending this to the ancilliary texts, the front cover of the digipak reflects the band's cooler, more serious nature, while the photograph on the inside cover conveys their more playful, lighthearted identity (see the images above).

Similarly, on the website, a combination of sillier and more serious shots are used:

Serious shots of the band members used on the about page - posing with their instruments, this presents their identity as musicians

Example of a more fun picture - using a fun picture on the competition page is appropriate since this is what would attract major fans of the band, who would be more interested to see every aspect to their identity

In conclusion our main text and ancilliary texts work together quite well to create an obvious brand image for our artist, but maybe the black background used on the website and digipak is contradictory to this image. Also the most significant aspect of our music video was the eras theme, and that is not referenced at all on the website or digipak. However our three products are more or less consistent stylistically and establish our artist's identity. 

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We had decided during the research and planning stage of the project that we wanted our target audience to be indie fans, and our secondary audience to be those aged 16-25, of all genders.

During the research and planning stage of the project I asked some of our audience how they consume music:

 

Above are examples of both our primary and secondary audiences - indie fans and 16-25 year olds. They both use iTunes and YouTube to consume music which shows that the Internet and digital downloading is a common method of music consumption.

However the second example also shows music consumption using CDs and Vinyl. This demonstrates diverse music consumption habits among this demographic, and could be a reflection of the indie/"hipster" mentality - wanting to consume 'vintage' products and engage in media that diverges from mainstream trends.

From this I created an audience profile for our target audience:

16-25 year-olds are arguably the most significant demographic of this audience since they are at the age where they have developed their own music taste and consume music in a variety of ways, from Vinyl to digital downloading. Older audiences would be less likely to consume music from new, upcoming young artists like our band.

We asked for feedback from our target audience throughout the editing process. This meant our audience could help us make decisions and point out problems with our video, so our final product would hopefully appeal to them more effectively.

The examples of feedback on the left were collected during editing. Since they both recognised the genre and understood the narrative we felt that we had effectively conveyed these in our video.

Both audience members pointed out problems with our editing: "jarring movement in band scene" and "one shot was out of sync". The benefit of asking for feedback during construction meant that we could fix these problems.








Using surveymonkey.com, we conducted a web-based online survey to find out how our audience responded to our video.

These first two questions gave us an idea of who was responding to our video. The majority being 16-25 was helpful because this is the age we would expect our audience to be. 

We also asked the audience to identify the genre of the song, to see if we had effectively conveyed the indie pop genre. 

Most people thought it was pop or indie, which suggests our artist was clearly indie pop as we had intended.

The following questions were more personal - we gave the audience the opportunity to answer the questions in their own words, to make sure we understood exactly how they had responded to our artist and music video.

Most of the comments criticised the band performance, which highlights this as a possible weakness of our video. The choreography criticism is also the second time our narrative scenes have been pointed out as boring or repetitive, so perhaps we should have made these more interesting and varied. 

For the final question we asked the audience if they had any other comments and if they would want to look into the band further:

The majority said that they would want to look into the band further, which suggests that our artist and video can appeal to this audience. Not everyone did, however, but this doesn't mean that our video/artist can't appeal to our target audience. The person who said it isn't their "sort of music" is actually a part of the 11-15 age group:

As we are targeting 16-25 year olds, and primarily fans of the genre, this person is not who we are targeting because they don't belong to either of these audiences.

The others who stated that they would not look into the band further did not say why, so it would have been more helpful if we had asked why this is the case. We also don't know what genres these people typically listen to. Even so, we know from this that our artist does not appeal to everyone in our secondary audience, but this is expected - 16-25 year olds are consumers of a diverse range of genres, and overall the feedback suggests that our artist could have a wide enough reach within this age group.

In addition to our survey, we filmed audience feedback sessions to give us more qualitative data and detailed, personal responses to our website and digipak in addition to our music video. For this we conducted one-to-one interviews with people both within and outside of our target audience.

MUSIC VIDEO FEEDBACK:

The feedback is explained in the chart below (hover the mouse at the bottom and zoom in/zoom out buttons will appear. Or you can double click to zoom in):

DIGIPAK FEEDBACK

WEBSITE FEEDBACK

This feedback is summed up in the presentation below:

Created with Padlet

The feedback shows a popular element of our digipak was the photograph of the band on the inside cover. This tells us that including images of the band on the digipak is appealing to the audience, which could be because audiences like to get an idea of who they are listening to - they want to see the artist as well as hear them.

Our banner on our website is also apparently distracting. Looking at existing websites, one example of a website with a moving banner is McFly's:

The difference is that their banner only appears on their homepage:

News page - no banner

From this we can learn that it might have been better for us to only show the banner on the home page.

Something else interesting that we learned from this feedback session is that our band have the potential to appeal to older audiences in ways we hadn't predicted: the digipak has a "feel of an old vinyl".

This doesn't necessarily mean that the band's music would appeal to this audience, but aesthetically the digipak can attract them as it looks like how music used to be packaged and so creates a sense of nostalgia.

Our colour scheme was also criticised as not conveying our indie pop genre. A different colour might have been more effective in targeting indie pop fans or attracting attention. The reason we chose black, however, is because we wanted to create a balance between the band's fun, upbeat and more serious aspects - to use only bright colours would seem very pop but not very indie. Maybe to improve we could have made the more serious indie element of their identity more obvious.

Black colour scheme on digipak and website

Overall our feedback suggests that our audience responded positively towards our music video, digipak and website, but there were some things that we could have improved for all three products. It is not entirely useful because we did not ask what genres they listen to, so we don't know if they are a part of our core target audience or not, but judging from the feedback if I could re-do the project I would make the narrative scenes of the video more interesting and varied and maybe reconsider which eras we included to make our theme more obvious to everyone.