eval

1. How Effective Is The
Combination of Your Main
Product and Ancillary Texts?
By Tyrell Bibbiani

2. My ancillary text to support my artist Chloe’s
music and music video consisted of a digipak
and a magazine advert promoting the digipak.
In a age of a rapid decline in CD’s due to online
streaming services and illegal content, there’s
still a niche audience who enjoys to purchase
their music through physical CD copies. It could
be argued that people who now purchase
digipaks purchase them as a collectible item
due to it becoming a rare thing that people do
nowadays.

3. The Project:
For this task, I had to create a music video which was my main
product, along with an accompany of 2 ancillary texts, which
consisted of a Digipak from my artist Chloe, along with a magazine
advert. This would be my print media.
What is significant about these 2 print media products is that they
compliment each other in terms of promoting one another. I felt as
though it was appropriate to create this ancillary project as this was
a common way in which the mainstream media chooses to promote
their artists and remain successful. In spite of this, it isn’t always a
successful technique as it must be made clear with ancillary texts
that they intertextually reference each other and the artist so that
the consumer can relate the ancillary texts to the artist’s music video
that they had previously seen and, want to purchase that artist’s
album.

4. Magazine Advert:
The combination of my main music video
product and ancillary texts was indeed
effective. From the research that I’d found,
other similar artists like Ariana Grande’s digipak
or Lady Gaga’s digipak would feature the
star/artist clearly so that the audience can
identify with who the artist is. So, I decided to
also incorporate this convention into my own
digipak magazine advert as I felt as though this
was a technique required to identify my artist
as a young pop star. This magazine advert also
related to my digipak due to it incorporating
both of the same dark grey colour scheme and
the light pastel pink colour scheme from the
albums digipak, along with having the same
album cover to promote the album and having
the same font as the album title, maintaining
consistency throughout. I also chose the 2
colours as they were very popular colours in
other relating artists digipaks.

5. The Digipak:
For my digipak as a piece of ancillary text, I felt as
though it was more than necessary to include multiple
images of the artist so that the audience would
inevitably know she is the artist for this
album/digipak and identify with her. I also decided to
correlate the pictures with some key iconic elements
from the music video so that the audience can notice
these key elements from the video within the digipak
shots and understand it is this artist. For example, in
the photo album and back cover tracklist, the dazzling
christmas lights are present, along with the 2 CD
covers having the flickering gold lights, which relates
and references the iconic scenes within the music
video. After researching similar artists to ‘Chloe’,
artists like Ariana Grande, Adele and Alicia Keys all
use a darker colour scheme and features the artist
heavily, so I felt it was more than necessary to also
incorporate this technique into my digipak with a
darker grey colour scheme. With the picture that I
used for the photo album page inside of the digipak,
this helped convey my artists characteristics due to
her playing with the dazzling lights and looking young,
fun and innocent, which she is also seen doing the
same within some scenes in the music video,
maintaining consistency.

6. Unique Selling Point (USP):
Within main stream media, it is essential that they have a USP as
there’re a lot of artists out there trying hard to break through into
the mainstream. So it is essential that they have something unique to
offer to the mass audience to get them noticed and engaged. This
technique is vital in ancillary texts.
As part of the USP within my artists ancillary texts, I would say that
the fact that my magazine poster features a scan-code square, this is
a USP technique that my artist has to offer because the idea of this is
that the audience can scan this on their phones and immediately the
single ‘Tattooed Heart’ will automatically play. This is my magazines
USP because most mainstream magazine posters doesn’t offer this
feature, making it a unique and engaging technique with the mass
audience.

7. Conclusively, I feel as though my ancillary text was
indeed effective in terms of the combination of my
music video and digipak/magazine cover. This is because
I kept the colour scheme essentially similar and had key
images that referenced iconic scenes within the music
video itself like the photo album – for example – helping
keep the characteristic of my artist as young, fun,
cheeky and innocent as she is smiling and playing with
the dazzling lights, which she is also seen doing within
scenes from the music video. I essentially wanted to
prioritise the idea of my artists image of innocence,
youngness and cheekiness consistent throughout both
of my ancillary texts and music video.