2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The main product I chose to make was a local newspaper due to my experience writing in my school paper and due to my aspirations to become a journalist and also I wanted to develop the print skills I learnt last year in AS making my magazine. In real life media texts like newspapers need to build a brand image by having successful marketing strategies to raise awareness. This is important to increase awareness on what is on offer and most importently boost sales.

The ancillary texts I chose to make were a radio advert and a poster. I chose this combination because of what I found in my research. I found that a lot of local newspaper posters were advertising supplements such a property guides and football pullouts, like mine. By advertising the supplement available in my edition of the “Bristol City Times” it allowed me to link all three products together. My supplement was “Score” a 16-page pullout of local league football and this is what was advertised on my poster and in my radio advert. I used the name of the supplement to link them all together along with the tagline, “For people who are mad about football” which is visible in both my ancillary texts. I chose not to do a website because it would not link as well together with the other ancillary task as I wouldn’t be able to just advertise my supplement. Also I had some more exciting ideas for the poster and radio advert and overall it seemed a more attractive proposition. It was important to keep continuity throughout my three products to build a brand image so they all link together, this is called synergy.

Before producing my ancillary texts I did some in depth research into all three options, the poster, radio advert and finally the one I didn’t choose the website. In my research I looked at posters from the “Evening Post” and the “Western Daily Press” and initally found they were quite hard to come by, which ment we had to write off for them. From the ones I did find I noticed that there is also one main phrase or tagline which the whole poster is built upon, for example “Accept No Substitute” taken from the poster from the “Evening Post’s” “Green-un”. I also noticed that they followed the papers house style, font colour and always including the newspapers title in the traditional manner in the footer of the poster. In the case of photos I noticed they are simple but still visually effective, for example a poster by the “Western Daily Press” shows a group of school children cheering to advertise support for local schools.

I also undertook some radio advert research from a number of sources. As I am doing a football supplement related radio advertisement I spent some time listening to “Talk Sport FM” and made some notes on the football and newspaper related adverts. I found that a main way to portray information in these adverts is by using the gimmick of sports commentators. I decided to use the idea as it is simple but allows humour to be added very easily and overall is very effective the listener immediately knows what the advertisement is likely to be about. I also looked at a number of other radio adverts just to access some ideas about how to present my radio advert. This gave me ideas about the structure of local newspaper adverts and persuaive devices they use. I found that humour is a main technique to make the message of the advert stick in the listeners mind also with repetition of the product name. These are the two main factors I tried to incorporate into my advertisement.

From all this research I wanted to create two ancillary tasks that were clearly connected together. By choosing to advertise my supplement in both my radio and newspaper it allowed me to easily connect my main task, the local newspaper, with the radio advert and poster. I was able to have a clear colour scheme connection between the paper and the poster and a catchy tagline, which connects the poster with the radio advert. Each ancillary task is clearly linked back to the paper and both can be seen to be part of the “Bristol City Times” collection. In the real market I think my products would fare very well as they connect well together and I believe the advertisement would be very effective due to my newspaper tagline and supplement, “Score”, tagline.

If I could remake my tasks I think there made me a few changes I would make. First of all I would have practiced more using “Garageband” before make my radio advert, as it was quite a quick and steep learning curve for me. If I was able to do this I may have been able to add extra features and improve the quality of my radio advert in the case of sound effects and jingles. I would also like to been able to take some more professional pictures with a high standard camera of football games, such as Bristol City’s home match, for a different version of my poster. As I don’t have a professional camera I can use freely I wasn’t able to get the quality of shots at these games.