1) The document discusses the effectiveness of combining media products and ancillary texts to promote a band targeting 16-24 year olds.
2) Images of a garage and college campus were used consistently across a magazine advert, digipak, and music video to create a sense of synergy and build the band's identity.
3) Matching fonts, color themes, and similar band images in the digipak and music video were intended to strengthen the band's identity and make them more recognizable to fans.
How Your Media Products Build a Youth Indie Band Identity
1. How Effective Is The Combination
Of You Main Media Product and You
Ancillary Texts?
2. All of my media products are targeted at a young audience, 16 – 24. Because of this the
images used in all of my products have the same aim to promote a youth indie culture
In both my magazine advert and Digipak I used consistent images to that combined to
give a sense of synergy to my products. This starts to build a band identity which makes
the promotional products have more meaning. I wanted the shots of the garage to
become associated with my band & album and become instantly recognisable on any
future media text which could be released to promote the band. The band are of the
Indie/Rock genre, but could also be associated with a 'garage band' – a form of indie
music that emerged in America in the 1990's
In my music video I used young actors 17 – 20 which tied in with the youth culture. As
with the garage location, the location for my music video was at my local college campus.
The grounds have a youthful feel to them as the high majority of people on site are
students, similar to the age of my target audience. I felt that my target audience would be
able to easily identify with the location and thus more with the characters on screen
If I were to re-shoot my video I would like to shoot some of the narrative footage near a
garage (like the one shown in my ancillary products) . This would create a stronger
correlation between my media products as the imagery featured would be the same
3. The images of the band used in my Digipak were taken during the same shoot that I used
to get some of the footage for the performance aspects of my music video. This meant
that the images used in the Digipak are very similar to the music video imagery which
strengthens the band identity. Fans should now easily be able to distinguish which
member is which form the video, when looking at the Digipak. This is important as the
band are not well known and are still rising in popularity
The font used in my ancillary products are also the same. This should lead to each being
more recognisable if someone has seen the other (e.g. Someone who has bought the
Digipak should automatically notice that the magazine advert is for the same band,
through the images, font, and colour theme)
Young people are the most active on social networking media. Through this I hoped that a
strong band identity would help the band achieve an online following which would lead to
more media attention. My target audience would share and follow information in order to
feel informed. This psychological need for media information was explored by Blumler
and Katz