Here is my response to the question.

1. In what ways does your media product use,
develop or challenge forms and conventions of
real media products?
Diana Alexandru

2. Throughout my research and development of my media products I have evaluated ways in which I
can use, develop and challenge current conventions of real media products. In my opinion, it is
important to use similar conventions because it allows the audience to easily understand what it
is advertised. By challenging the conventions we can slightly push the boundaries which makes
the media products more interesting to the audience.
Thus, I was able to create a new product that is original to the audience. If you create an original
piece of work, you can usually gain a huge amount of publicity, for both positive and negative
reasons. Although positive feedback is crucial, the use of negative feedback can create a huge
amount of attention for a certain media product, which can lead to larger audiences and high
amounts of publicity.
Challenging conventions can also lead to the unexpected, the audience will no longer be able to
predict what is being shown – this can also create a large amount of interest. An audience will
have to pay attention because they lack knowledge of what will happen further into the media
product.
Before creating my product I knew the importance of using and challenging conventions.
Therefore, I tried to balance out the use of both by using a mixture of technical and symbolic
conventions from existing media products.

3. For my main product, the two TV advertisements I tried to conform and challenge the conventions by putting my own
ideas in them.
Among the conventions used in the commercials, one of utmost importance is the chromatic theme. The colours used are
in tone with the stereotypical characters presented in the adverts, their personalities and the activities seen. This has an
impact on the viewer, creating a feel for the type of person the product is dedicated to. Since there are two stereotypes
depicted in the adverts (two different types of women who would use the perfume), the colours have an important role in
complimenting them, offering a more subtle insight regarding the nuances of the characters.

4. While on the matter of characters, this is one of the conventions that I have tried to challenge: the different women
stereotypes. We often see how adverts and other forms of media depict women types with having no similarities with
one another, but for Vôtre, I tried to find a common ground between them: the fragrance suited for each of them.
Starting with this idea, it immensely helped me shape the image of the product and scope out what I sought to
achieve.

5. Most importantly, I decided to challenge another typical convention of advertising by not having in the advertisements
men characters. The majority of perfumes “for Her” are sexualised because they have a male character who is usually
following the women for wearing her fragrance. With this project, I wanted to go against stereotypes and conventions
by taking out the male character from the story and only focus on the female character and her actions.

6. The radio advert features the music track used in one of the video adverts for the product, in order to give it an appealing factor for
the audience and also enhancing the general theme of the product, making it easier to remember and relate to it.
The TV sponsorship sequence meets, develops and challenges the conventions through time length, voiceover and scenes from
the TV advertisements. However, my partner and I challenged the typical conventions by creating a split screen that will help
the audience understand the main concept of this perfume – showing the two different young women.
By using these conventions and trying to challenge them, we have managed to come up with a product that we believe to be
unique in both its scent and message, a product which is suitable for every woman, yet it still manages to be something new and
refreshing.
Here are examples of existing and well known TV adverts that gave us inspiration for our TV advertisements and TV sponsorship
sequence: