Friday, 19 December 2008

Analysis of similar adverts

Title of Ad: No artificial colours or flavours
Company: Robinsons
Product: Orange squash

Form/Style
Animation/ Slice of life

Textual Analysis
-The entire advert was a mid shot
-There was no transitions used during the advert as it was short, the advert focused on a bee flying around therefore the camera just tracked the bee.
-There was a variety of colours to attract the children
-The orange drink signifies the flavour of the squash is orange.
-During the first part of the advert everything is artificial and fake, for example the dog is blue, the bee is purple and the eagle is purple, this is unrealistic and artificial however, the last part of the ad are natural colours. For example the bird is brown the tree is green, therefore connoting the squash is also natural and not containing artificial colouring or flavouring.
-Voice over of a man informing the audience of the productSoundtrack is catchy and non diegetic signifying the drink will be fun and energetic to drink

Key Concepts
-The advert is targeted at young children as the protagonist of the advert is a young boy. -Furthermore the advert is also targeted at mums as they will be buying the product for their child as it is now fresh and healthy.
-The representation of squash is positive and fresh portrayed through the realistic colours of objects towards the end of the advert.
-The ideology of this advert is that the orange squash is good for children as it doesn’t include artificial flavours or colouring.

Title of Ad: So Seedy
Company: McVities
Product: Chocolate digestive biscuits

Form/Style
Animation/ Slice of life

Textual Analysis
-A mixture of zooms and cut transitions
-Close up of seeds to signify the new seedy digestive
-The dancing and singing about becoming a chocolate digestive connotes the excitement of one and how great they are.
-The advert is set in a wheat field to represent the amount of seeds that will be in the seedy digestive
-The narrative is a conversation between two seeds about being in a chocolate digestive
-There is no soundtrack as the advert fully concentrates on the conversation. The voice over of the woman explains the new seedy digestive biscuit.
-The packaging in which the digestives come in is showed at the end of the advert to remind the audience what it looks like.

Key Concepts
-The advert is aimed at people who enjoy chocolate biscuits.
-The brand McVities it shown throughout the advert to allow the audience to relate to previous adverts containing digestive biscuits.
-The unique selling point is that it is exciting and great to eat the biscuits and the main character of the advert is full of energy and happy representing a digestive biscuit.

Title of Ad: That Friday feeling
Company: Cadbury
Product: Crunchie

Form/Style
Animation/ Slice of life

Textual Analysis
-The advert is full of cut transitions to add pace to the advert which is similar to the action as it is quick and fast.
-In addition to this, the advert switches between mid shots and close ups to allow the audience to engage with the characters.
-The soundtrack is non diegetic with a fast pace to match the action, as the music is fun and exciting it is also similar to the action. The lyrics also represent the product as “I’m so excited and I just can’t hide it” reflects that people are excited about crunchie. The rollercoaster signifies the fun the characters are having similarly to what the consumer will have if they eat the crunchie.
-The set is made out of chocolate signifying how chocolaty the crunchie bar is.The gold and brown signify the colour of the chocolate and honeycomb on a crunchie.

Key Concepts
-The unique selling point of this crunchie is that it is exciting and gives you that Friday feeling.
-The advert targets chocolate lovers, and people who are outgoing and want to have fun.The representation of the chocolate bar is positive.

Research of Advertising

History of Advertising
Advertising ‘agents’ first appeared about 100 years ago, and originally worked for the media, selling advertising space for newspapers and magazines, and receiving commission from publications on the cost of the space sold. This original business then developed along the lines of ‘vertical integration’ - the agents gradually realised that they could work more effectively if they could suggest what went into the advertisement: if they could take the business of printing the advertisements away from the media and do it themselves as far as possible. They then gradually developed additional functions, first employing copywriters, then adding artists to their business, and finally employing a production team to oversee printing methods.
As such advertising ‘agents’ became established, and attracted regular business from advertiser clients, they began to face split in their loyalties, and were forced to choose between selling advertising space for specific publishers, or advising their clients impartially as to the best publications in which to advertise most effectively. They gradually swing to the latter operation, and became creators and advisers rather then salesmen. As the final stage in their development process, they then had to employ people who had experience of the best publications to advertise any particular product in, and who could negotiate with the media about advertising position, price and date of appearance - they then had to add the beginnings of the modern media department to their businesses.
By this point, the advertising ‘agents’ had broken away entirely from their subordinate position as media salesmen, and formed businesses in their own right with direct links to their clients rather than to the media being used. The media, however, continued to grant a certain commission to agencies which they regarded as efficient and financially sound, if they accepted (annually) certain conditions, e.g. promising not to refund any of the media-agency commission to the advertisers in an attempt to lower prices.

Development
Up until the 2nd World War, most advertising agencies, (especially in Britain) were, by modern standards, rudimentary affairs. The most important men were copywriters, who used their instinct and experience to produce copy that would motivate a generally defined group of consumers to buy the product - this copy was then laid out and illustrated if necessary by the artists, with the copy as the guiding principle. Media men, too, placed the ads by experience and instinct, with only circulation figures to guide them, and production men had only to contend with black and white letterpress in limited ranges, one commercial radio station - virtually no cinema opportunities. The whole business, in short, was conducted on an ad hoc basis, with little systematic effort because of a lack of theory and of practical data.
After the war, this situation changed completely with the introduction of the concept of marketing from America, which changed the emphasis in business from what the manufacturer wished to make and this times to sell through marketing (‘product orientation’) to what the consumer wished to buy and wanted to know about through advertising (‘consumer orientation’). This required a whole range of new facts not previously available; facts about consumers (what they wanted, who wanted what, at what price etc); and facts about the distribution of P/S (what was available, where and in what form - retail, wholesale etc). Both media/market research, and companies specialising in this business, quickly developed to meet this need.
The development of the marketing concept changed the role of the advertising agency yet again - instead of restricting itself to producing ads and placing them effectively, it began to look at all the ways in which a clients business could be ‘promoted’. Before thinking about creating an advertisement at all, it began to look at relevant but wider questions -whether the P/S really matched the consumer’s needs, or whether something new is needed; what the differing levels of distribution were, and how media expenditure should be organised to match this etc. Similarly, its creative work became more complex to match these more specialised requirements, as did production to meet new printing/processing techniques.
Finally, as agencies grew in size to cope with all these extra functions, they attached more importance to the post of ‘account manager’, who acted as a co-ordinator for all these activities throughout an agency on one specific ‘account’, and also represented the agency to the client. In the late 50s, with the marketing concept firmly established in advertising for products in similar categories became somewhat repetitive and hard to tell apart. This led to greater emphasis being placed on the individuality and impact of ads in all media. Creativity became the guiding principle of advertising and this lead to a rapid expansion of ‘hot shop’ agencies -
Small business, often no more than 2/3 people, whose only service was a creative solution to a marketing problem presented to them from outside. The end result was a tide of award-winning but largely unintelligible and ineffective ads.
The final stages in this development process were the increase in size amongst many agencies in the late 60s/early 70s through a series of merger and takeover and the diversification of these larger agencies into a wide variety of other fields and specialities - PR services, product development , package design, direct response, recruitment etc. - until they became full service marketing and communications agencies and not just ‘advertising’ agencies.

Wednesday, 17 December 2008

Plans for January

During the Christmas holiday, Kelsey and I have arranged to book out 2 Macs in order for us both to be able to complete work. As Kelsey doesn't feel comfortable using Premiere, I am going to edit the clips we have left and then put them in order and add transitions on there whilst Kelsey edits the clips I am going to shoot this week. This will allow our finished product to be complete for January. In January, we are going to focus on advert 2 and re shoot any clips we need to for advert 2. However, when we have finished shooting advert 2, either me or Kelsey will edit the clips whilst the other one films advert 3, this will allow us to be on course to reach our final deadline. I will conduct a new shooting schedule for January to enable us to remain organised.

Update of my progress

Throughout our coursework Kelsey and I have overcome many problems in order to get to the stage at which we are at now. Our first deadline was last week, however we did not meet it as it was to complete advert 1 and in rough advert 2 and 3. Although, I remain positive to meet the deadline in February and we are on course. Advert 1 will take the longest to complete as towards the beginning we had to learn how to use the software, therefore during advert 2 and 3 I feel we can achieve a finished product quicker. Lighting was a re-occurring problem as it was hard to get minimal shadows but enough shadows to create a realistic set, however we have overcome this problem by having the angle of the lighting exactly the same for each clip. Also whilst using Flash, as we were knew to the software we kept forgetting to crop the clip and therefore after editing it and exporting the clip half of the video would be cut out and therefore we would have to re-edit. Along the way of producing our product Kelsey and I have had some healthy disagreements, however we have come to the agreement to not include a mid shot of the boat and island in the corner as the audience won't be able tell it is an island and probably believe it to be a sun and as we have many clip of the boat to establish the setting we felt it wouldn't be necessary to include it. Also after I had animated most of the clips we have already completed Kelsey felt that having to in depth eyes would lose the childlike effect and therefore we have decided to change the eyes to just dots and include a mouth to enable us to create expressions, allowing the audience to understand the advert better. Finally, I believe that our advert 1 will be finished at the beggining of January allowing us to begin advert 2.

Wednesday, 10 December 2008

Problems with Advert 1

Throughout making advert 1 we have faced many problems. One of which is the lighting, this has been one of our main problems when filming as each time we left our work and come back to it we couldn't get the colour of the lighting the same. Therefore, we had to re-shoot many of the clips in order for the lighting to be the same or similar in each clip. Another problem in which we came across was sizes, whilst making all of our props, we believed they would have to be larger than what was needed, as the scale of the surface we was working on was smaller than needed.

Monday, 8 December 2008

Changes

Today we decided to change which programme we use, we was going to use iMovie, however we are now going to use Adobe Premiere. This is because iMovie only allows us to use two different layers of sound and as we need layers for soundtrack, sound effects and voice overs we therefore felt Premiere would be more beneficial as sound is a significant part for our advert as we can't use different shot styles.

Tuesday, 2 December 2008

Animating Clip 1

Today, Kelsey and I animated our first two clips. This was a great success and gave us both a lot of confidence. The clip in which I animated was clip 1 and after many attempts, I have finally edited the clip to the standards needed and which we can use in the advert. However, when I put the clip on to iMovie I will edit it and cut the end off so that the arms are still with the men at the end of the clip. Kelsey animated the the clip in which the tropical skittle and original skittle meet. I love this clip as i feel it portrays what we have been trying to achieve, a childlike advert. This was achieved through the childlike drawing of the arms and legs, and of the childish handshake between the two characters. Furthermore, we have also decided to include just the initial 'S' on the skittle men and their eyes as there is no room for a mouth as well, therefore we felt the eyes would be more beneficial as there will be music, enabling the skittles to not have to speak.

Wednesday, 26 November 2008

iMovie

Today, Kelsey and I continued to film the rest of advert 1. We successfully completed all of the parachuting clips and the lookout clip. This has left us with only the island clips to complete before we can begin the animation stage. We also put all of our finished clips on to iMovie so we could get an understanding of how far we've got left to complete. By putting our clips into iMovie and on a timeline it allowed us to cut clips and parts which aren't needed. In addition to this, it also gave us a chance to see what transitions we felt would be suitable. Furthermore, we have decided when animating to draw arms on the skittle characters as it wouldn't look realistic on the other adverts and therefore advert characters also will need arms aswell as legs, eyes and a mouth.

Friday, 14 November 2008

Problems with animating

Today, I finished re shooting all of the boat scenes and decided to film an extreme close up of the boat just to focus on the skittle characters. I also tried animating the skittles men using Flash, adding arms, however after several attempts I felt it would look better if the skittle characters had no arms and only legs. This is also because we have placed the skittle characters too close together in the boat and therefore the arms don't look realistic. Although, I think the characters will look just as good without arms as they look more cute and childlike in the boat. I found using Flash difficult as it was my first time using this programme, however I was determined to complete the clip including key frames, and moving each individual arm each frame.

Thursday, 6 November 2008

Problems with clip 1

In addition to this, we also filmed clip 1 and also struggled with this. The problem with this clip was that we couldn't get the sea to move realistically and therefore decided to just move the boat in frame by frame and edit the sea after. However, we also feel the lighting in this clip was a problem and we will therefore re-shoot this clip aswel. I will also cut up the felt to enable us to move the sea without moving the whole of the felt to make it realistic.

Problems with clip 13

We have decided to film advert 2 first as we feel this will take the longest to complete. However, when filming clip 13 we had numerous problems, to begin with we wanted to create a sense of verisimilitude and decided the skittles men when parachuting down would fall under the clouds. However, this proved difficult and after trying a number of times using the programme frame by frame the clouds would not stay in a fixed position. Therefore, we decided that two of the parachuting skittles would go between three clouds and the third parachuting skittle would follow closely after. We then experimented with different angles until we felt we had the correct distance shot. After shooting clip 13, we decided to add another clip of a close up of one of the parachuting skittles to get a range of angles and distances. However, whilst looking at them again we found that the lighting was poor and if the animation was lighter it would make it more colourful as animations are. Therefore, we will re-shoot clip 13 tomorrow using 3 lamps in order to cast no shadows.

Tuesday, 4 November 2008

Our initial Storyboard 1

This was our initial storyboard 1 promoting original skittles. However, we decided to change it as the song we had chosen to use ( 1 2 3 4- fiesta) was very popular and therefore felt it had been over used. In addition to this, storyboard 1 didn't connect as well with the other two as it wasn't a 'slice of life'. However, we had difficulty finding another song which was similar to the actions in storyboard 1 as the clips mirrored the lyrics and we therefore decided we needed to create a new storyboard. Furthermore, we then felt as the other two skittle products were of a new flavour our storyboard 1 should also be a new flavour, enabling us to chose the carnival skittles as our new idea.

Shooting Schedule...October- November


Friday, 31 October 2008

Tuesday, 21 October 2008

Treatment

The product we have chosen to advertise is ‘Skittles’, our first advert begins with an establishing shot of the new flavoured ‘Fairy Floss’ skittle on a pink float mirroring a carnival float as we are promoting the new carnival skittles. The advert introduces all the new flavours on different floats reflecting their flavours. Furthermore, the soundtrack for advert 1 will be an old fairground mix to create a sense of fun and excitement linking to the skittles. The majority of our transitions are cuts as it quickly moves on to the next flavour.

Our second advert begins with an establishing shot of the original skittles on a boat in search for new flavours. The advert is a ‘slice of life’ as it I storytelling. The original skittles discover a tropical island in which they set anchor on and find new tropical skittles. The majority of our transitions for advert 2 are cuts as it allows the advert to flow quickly. In addition to this, the unique selling point is the new flavours available and our line of appeal is confidently, allowing children to feel confident when eating them. The soundtrack for advert 2 will be ‘You can get it if you really want’ by Desmond Dekker combine with many sound effects for example the sea and wind to create a sense of verisimilitude.

Our third advert begins with an establishing shot of the new wild berry skittle’s packet to allow the audience to relate with previous skittle flavours. This advert will be crammed with little skittle men performing dangerous and wild stunts, such as jet skiing and sky diving. The soundtrack for advert 2 will be ‘Wild thing’ by The Troggs, but will also contain many sound effects and voice overs, for example the sea and wind. The majority of transition for advert 3 will also be cuts as similarly to advert 1 the advert moves quickly in order to introduce all of the new flavours.

Additionally, our target audience ranges from 7-13 years old as the animation will connect more with children and younger ages. All of our adverts are linked through the ‘slice of life’ effect and the colours of the skittle men in each. Furthermore, each of our adverts end similarly to allow the audience to relate to previous adverts as the skittles jump into the new flavoured packet. I feel that we are promoting our product in a positive and correct way for our specific target audience.

In order for all of our adverts to link, we decided to use animation to create our campaign. The specific technique we have chosen to use is a mixture of stop animation, physically manipulated objects and photographing them one frame of film at a time to create the illusion of movement and cutout animation. This is produced by moving 2-dimensional pieces of material such as paper or card. We will further improve our advert by editing it on different programmes such as frame by frame and adobe premiere.

Wednesday, 8 October 2008

Possible Soundtracks

Advert 1:
Old fairground mix..



Advert 2:
Desmond Dekker- You can get it if you really want...



Advert 3:
The Troggs- Wild thing...

More Research

Psychographics marketing

Some points on psychographics which give me a deeper insight into choosing a target audience and product.

What is Psychographics Marketing?
Most marketing involves certain demographics, which refers to factors such as the age, location, marital status, ethnicity and religion of the person in question. Psychographics goes beyond this to ask questions of the lifestyles, behaviour and attitude of the person in question to build up a more detailed picture of who they are. These tend to be directly related to consumerism, and the type of products that people prefer to buy based on their lifestyle choices.

Why is psychographics marketing important?
Surveys that ask these types of questions are vital to market researchers, who often use them to gain information on people who have bought their products in the past, or are tempted to do so in the future. Psychographics marketing can work alongside demographic marketing to allow advertisers to promote their products effectively, in order to sell their products in the long term. As many advertisers concentrate predominantly on demographics, using psychographics marketing as well can leave advertisers one-step ahead of their competition. In the past, advertisers could easily buy advertising space that targeted the people that they wanted to buy their products. For example, they could buy advertising space which targeted men aged 18-35 who lived in the city. This was done using demographics. With the introduction of psychographics marketing, advertisers can now target specific men within that demographic, such as men who like to work out, or eat healthily. This helps them reach out to the men who may ultimately buy their products, whilst bypassing the ones who probably would not. They can do this by buying advertising space in a health and fitness magazine, for example. Men who do not have an interest in this topic are unlikely to read these types of magazines, so it is a cost-effective way of targeting the specific people that may buy your products."


The 4th wall of advertising

4th Wall Of Advertising = Not going to patronise the consumers, creating advertising that makes them think and make a decision for themselves rather than telling them what to do, allowing the audience to be active opposed to passive. Branbach believed you had to start with the product, investigate the product before anything else. Apple subverted this 4th wall concept by taking the PC's shortcomings and comparing them with that of the Macs.

TYPES OF TV ADVERTISEMENTS:
- Political TV advertising = made by an organization/institution to influence the decision making process eg. elections.
- Infomercials = run for over one minute or as long as a television program and are usually on in the early hours of the morning. Also known as teleshopping.
- Product placement = promotional advertisements made by marketers using real commercial products and services in media.
- Sponsorship = something to support an event, activity, person or campaign which is funded financially through the provision of other products or services.

Development of digital video recorder (TiVo, Sky+) means people can record television programs directly onto a hard drive, allowing them to "fast-forward" or "skip" through the advertisements. As a result of this, many speculate that TV advertisements will be eliminated altogether and replaced by product placement advertising such as how in the TV program, "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition", they only use certain brands of products when building the houses. By showing these products being used on a program, it immediately provides that brand with promotion and advertising.

Codes and conventions of television include: catchy jingles, catch-phrases, animation, and element of surprise.

Animation
Animation (drawn or computer generated) can give a certain appeal which would be difficult to achieve with actors etc. Notable advert: Kellog's Rice Krispies, combining the characters, Snap, Crackle & Pop with real actors. ANIMATION APPEALING TO CHILDREN.

TV adverts today appear between shows but also interrupt the show at intervals. This method of interrupting shows was used grab the attention of the viewers because they were already focused on the TV show and would not change channel during the adverts because they would not want to miss any of the show. However, with the development of remote controls, it has made it a lot easier for people to change channel during the advertisements, meaning advertisers are having to come up with ideas to keep the audience interested enough to sit through the advertisements.

The Process of Advertising

Advertising Communicates
All adverts try to SAY something to the consumer about the product or service they are advertising. They contain a message, through which the advertiser hopes to positively influence our thinking in favour of their brand.

Advertising is Part of a wider marketing process
Other factors, such as price and availability, also exert an important influence, so advertising has to work alongside the other elements of MARKETING in an 'integrated' way to communicate effectively with the consumer.

Advertising Sells
It costs a lot of money to put together an advertising campaign: Advertising must therefore EARN BACK the money it spends, by generating new business which more than covers what the advertising cost.

Industry Structure
ADVERTISERS - who spend money on advertising
AGENCIES - who think up campaigns for their clients, and who select the media in which they will appear
MEDIA OWNERS - who run the media organizations (papers, TV stations, poster companies etc.) which carry the adverts to consumers

Research- Controlling advertising

A commonly used acronym to describe the purpose of advertisements is DRIP:
D - differentiate a company’s products from those of their competitors.
R - Reassure and remind consumers of the benefits of the products or services.
I - inform people about an advertiser’s products, services or cause.
P – Persuade people that they should believe what they see in the ad and to take action in light of it.

The ASA
The rules are used by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to judge whether advertisements are legal, decent, honest and truthful. Called the CAP Code, the rulebook is written by the advertising industry itself, through an organisation called the Committee of Advertising Practice or CAP for short. CAP believes that self-imposed rules are necessary so that consumers can trust the advertisements they see; if they believe ads shoppers will be more willing to buy the goods and services being advertised. If a product or service does not live up to the claims made about it in an advertisement, consumers may not buy that product or service again. The experience may also make the consumers doubt the trustworthiness of all advertising.
The ASA began applying the CAP Code over forty years ago, in 1962 - the same year the Cuban Missile Crisis took place and the first satellite for broadcasting TV, Telstar, was launched. The Code has been revised regularly since then to keep it up to date with changes in advertising techniques. When the Code was first launched, for example, the technique of sending advertising messages to consumers through the post, known as direct mail, had only just started. Now consumers can receive advertising messages directly to their computers or mobile phones by e-mail and SMS text message. The latest edition of the Code reflects these advances in technology. So as well as advertisements in traditional media, such as the cinema, newspapers, magazines and posters, the Code now also covers banner ads and pop-ups on the Internet, commercial e-mails and text messages and new forms of outdoor media such as moving image posters, often seen at major rail stations.

The main principles of the Code are:
- All marketing communications should be legal, decent, honest and truthful
- All marketing communications should be prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and society
- All marketing communications should respect the principles of fair competition generally accepted in business
- No marketing communication should bring advertising into disrepute.

To ensure consumers are not misled by advertisements, advertisers should meet these particular rules in the CAP Code:

Honesty
Marketers should not exploit the credulity, lack of knowledge or inexperience of consumers.

Truthfulness
No marketing communication should mislead, or be likely to mislead, by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration, omission or otherwise.

Principles
All marketing communications should be prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and to society.

Fear and Distress
No marketing communication should cause fear or distress without good reason. Marketers should not use shocking claims or images merely to attract attention.
Marketers may use an appeal to fear to encourage prudent behaviour or to discourage dangerous or ill-advised actions; the fear likely to be aroused should not be disproportionate to the risk.

Safety
Marketing communications should not condone or encourage unsafe practices. Particular care should be taken with marketing communications addressed to or depicting children.
Consumers should not be encouraged to drink and drive. Marketing communications should, where appropriate, include a prominent warning on the dangers of drinking and driving and should not suggest that the effects of drinking alcohol can be masked.

Violence and Anti-social behaviour
Marketing communications should contain nothing that condones or is likely to provoke violence or anti-social behaviour.

Initial ideas

To begin with we brainstormed different flavours and varieties of skittles for advert 1, 2 and 3.
However, for advert 1 we have chosen to promote Carnival Of Fun Skittles. For advert 2 we have decided to use Tropical Skittles and finally we have chosen for advert 3, to use Wild Berry Skittles. In addition to this, we will use all three slogans in each of our adverts.

Slogans:
Feel the rainbow
Taste the rainbow
Blend the rainbow
Extreme fruit skittles:
Watermelon
Blue raspberry
Wild cherry
Tangerine
Green apple
Carnival of fun skittles:
Berry go round
Gum ball
Cotton candy
Pink lemonade
Candy apple
Smoothie mix skittles:
Lemon berry
Orange mango
Strawberry banana
Mixed berry
Peach pear
Lemon berry
Sour skittles:
Apple-y ever after
Blue raspberry
Wizard watermelon
Sour strawberry
Sour lemon
Wild berry skittles:
Strawberry
Berry punch
Melon berry
Raspberry
Wild cherry
Tropical skittles:
Strawberry star fruit
Kiwi lime
Banana berry
Mango tangelo
Pineapple passion fruit
Original skittles:
Strawberry
Orange
Grape
Lemon
Lime
Ice cream skittles:
Strawberry
Vanilla
Chocolate
Caramel ripple
Orange vanilla swirl
Bubblegum skittles:
Orange
Lime
Strawberry
Grape
lemon

Friday, 27 June 2008

My Blog

This is my diary for my A2 coursework which allows me to record date, post videos and links in order to help me create my advert