1. 2. How effective is the combination of your main product and
ancillary texts?
• We felt as though it was important to be consistent when combining ‘Tasty Takeaways’
with our ancillary texts. We used the same voiceover in our documentary as we did in our
radio advert. This helped to create a product identity for our audience to associate our work
with. If we did choose a different voice over in our radio advert to the documentary, this
might cause the audience to not have any sort of association between our products and
therefore would be ineffective. Having the same narrator for all of our products is
tremendously important in terms of being a guide for the audience. Audiences watch
documentaries for guidance so that unanswered questions they have from the print or radio
advertisements can be answered.
• Audiences in documentaries prefer it when the narrator gives a third person point of view
because this is much more informative and panoramic. If we had told the narrator to say
words such as ‘I believe this happened because…’ there is less of a chance that the audience
will feel a part of the documentary. This is due to the fact that the narrator is expressing his
own opinion rather than informing the audience into making there own decision like all
unbiased documentaries should do. I believe that we didn’t allow the narrator to express his
own opinion. However, there was one part of the documentary where the narrator said “We
compared a supermarket meal to a similar takeaway and found that it was over £5 cheaper
with a lower content of unhealthy additives”. There was not much evidence on screen to
support what the narrator was saying and therefore we made him sound slightly unjustified.
2. Radio Advertisement
• In our Radio advert, there were some clips that were taken from the documentary. These were
intended as previews for the audience as an attempt of enticement. The radio advertisement
contains the same music from our documentary. The audio levels of the music go up when there is
no other audio being played in the same clip. The volume of the music goes down when clips from
the documentary are played and when the narrator is speaking. This is to try and make the sound
clear for the audience to understand and my personal opinion is that it was. This opinion is without
the influence of feedback from the audience.
• By using “Weird Al” Yankovic’s ‘Eat It’ in our radio advert, it promotes the fact that the documentary
is not too serious because of how catchy and up beat the song is. If we used a sad song such as
‘Mad World’ by Gary Jules, not only would this be inappropriate and inconsistent, it would suggest
to the audience that the documentary is depressing. This wouldn’t be something that teenagers
would enjoy watching. It would immediately tell the audience that takeaways are widely thought of
as a negative problem. A song like this could lead the audience to draw to a conclusion before they
have even watched the documentary which we strictly did not want them to do.
• We took some audio snippets from the documentary. These were from either our vox pop
interviews or from our main interviews. We tried to keep the questions open for the teenagers in
our vox pops to answer. My main objective of using a question which had been tailored to be open
for vox pop answers was to try and get the audience to answer the question themselves in their
head. We used the narrator to link to voices from the vox pops to the restaurant owner together.
When he says “We are all familiar with the idea of takeaways” it makes the vox pops sound like a
brief representative of everyone, almost as though he carried out a survey.
3. Our Advertisement Channel 4’s Advertisement
• Another point where we were consistent was when we always used the same text in our documentaries as
we did in our print advertisement. Again, this helps promote their identity as associative products whilst
they still differentiate from each other.
• We created this print advertisement as an attempt to be similar to Channel 4 because they try and promote
a lot of their content to younger audiences. We can compare this to an example from Channel 4’s ‘The
Morgana Show’. Our print advert similar to the print advert which Channel 4 created because of the right
location of the ‘4’ logo is and the location of the title and scheduling information. Channel 4 use their own
font in print advertisements which we were unable to obtain. Hense, this is another reason as to why we
used the same font from our documentary on the print advert. The orange fill colour was chosen because it
matches the colour of the sauce. We chose to have a white background in our print advertisement because
this colour represents neutrality. For a full list of the codes and conventions of Print Advertisements, please
look on my blog.
• When documentary makers implement an advertising campaign, it is important for the products that they
are promoting to implement a strapline each time a possible viewer sees them. When a program has a
good strapline, it is more likely to intrigue an audience enough for them to watch a program. They can be
the difference between getting a large audience and not getting and not getting anyone watching the
program at all.
