AS2 Task 2 - Ideas Generation

I have several ideas for the advert that we are going to make. Since my audience research has brought up information that a lot of people like a funny, relatable and memorable advert I'm planning on making a funny or silly advert which would make it easier for people to remember it because of how different it would be from a lot of adverts that are aired on TV.

First Idea

It will be a stand alone advert which will showcase an anonymous character making a normal milkshake before completely destroying the scene and placing down a milkshake that we are trying to sell. Hopefully this will attract mostly a teenage audience who knows that we used HowToBasic as inspiration for the advert. This will mean that we would need to target people who watch youtube quite often and know of the many popular and viral channels around the website. Even if they do not then they will probably share it with other people and in the process find the original source of inspiration. The USP will probably be the slogan that one of the group members came up with: "Smash Shakes - The easy way to gourmet!" which fits the advert because of how the milk shake is made amongst things being smashed around.

Video Information

We'll probably have a POV camera shot throughout the entire advert to keep the main character mysterious and interesting whilst having the same character making the milkshake before throwing a tantrum and placing the milkshake we are selling on the table. Since the camera will be possibly held or placed on the person who is doing most of the movements in the advert, the camera-work might be shaky and sudden to simulate the adrenaline and frustration experienced by the person trying to make the milkshake.

Second Idea

The other idea that I have for the advert is to film a person normally making a milkshake but then saying that to add more flavour the person making the milkshake they should add some waffles and syrup but instead of adding them in small amounts they just completely chuck away the normal milkshake and place our milkshake on the table and then say "Smash-Shakes - The easy way, is the best way" or something after which we cut to the company logo and a slogan. This advert will also be aimed towards the youth more than adults because of the humour and silliness of it.

Video Information

The camera placement will be like in the shows where people showcase items and objects for people to buy with a lot of advertising around the TV screen to attract people's attention and then it will get closer to the actor/actress who will say the final line and then it will cut to the logo and slogan. There will probably be some silent music being played in the background which might be added in during the editing period to add some more detail to the advert.

AS2 Task 1 - Target and Market Research

We chose to do an advert for a new flavour of milkshake which is a waffle and maple syrup milkshake. We were going through ideas of different things we could do and after around 30 we decided to include food because we were hungry and we came across a mix of different milkshakes, ice-creams and such.

After we listed down some snack foods and drinks, we decided to try several combinations of different things and we stumbled across a mixture of waffles, maple syrup and a milkshake.


This is a screenshot of my survey creation process

My survey link is: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/TW6GKW3



I found several adverts for milkshakes.

The first is a Shaky Jake advert from 1996 which was when it was aired on TV. The advert became very popular with the youth, mostly children and then teenagers because of its joyful and happy theme and animations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEyZ3DCOPbg

The second one is the 2012 advert for Crusha. I don't particularly like the advert because of the 2D animation which doesn't appeal to me, but it caught a lot of people's attention, again, mostly children and teenagers but some people did find this slightly annoying. The catchy beat of the song managed to stick to a lot of people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GSChopXJ3c

The next advert is by Crusha again but it isn't as bad. It's completely an animation again, but it's more controlled and to the point. It appeals to children and teenagers but I think that the maturity of the advert has been changed to be aimed towards teenagers and young adults more than children. This could be because their original audience would have grown up and they still want them to continue buying their product but it could also be because not all children know how to add milkshake mix properly and could mess up with the mixture to milk ratio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S24T8gV2sUQ

It seems to me that most, if not all, milkshake adverts are aimed towards children and teenagers. The adverts that I have looked at all have a cheerful and energetic element to it making it seem more enticing to buy the product compared to most adverts aired on TV about adult-related things. The adverts that I like the most are the animations because of their surreal aspect and how free they can be with whatever they want to do, like cats and mice doing stunts that only humans can do.

I think that for our advert we should do something funny and that would connect or would amuse the younger audience more than it would the older audiences. I think this would be a good idea because younger audiences (more specifically 12 - 19) tend to be more entertained and more intrigued by adverts that do something to relate to them in some way such as having an element of comedy that they would like to see on TV.

I also looked at adverts of milkshakes on the internet and found that most of them are surreal. By this, I mean that most of the adverts are made to look as if there are animals that organise events that humans are capable of.

AS2 Task 0 - The Language of Advertising

Language devices are used in advertising to attract the targeted audience that the advertisers want. Many different techniques are used to attract the audience such as alliteration, abbreviation, rhymes, personal pronouns and many others. These devices have been tested and are found to attract the attention of a person more than a basic group of text as they are different from the rest and are slightly funkier.

                               

There are many genres of magazines that are published daily and some of them are music, sports, gaming, food, lifestyle, fitness, glamour, kid/teen/adult/"adult", news, computing, gardening and fashion among many.

Magazines always follow the same layout as well. They have the main focal point in the centre with the title of the magazine at the top somewhere and all of the main intriguing topics around the sides. The main topics and titles are bigger than the other titles as they are the ones that have been focused on more in the magazine, such as Battlefield 3 being several sizes larger than the text above it and the other topics around it.

This magazine featuring Ellie Goulding features all of the main language devices that are found in all magazines. It has the main focal point (Ellie Goulding) at the centre of the magazine cover with the title of the magazine company behind her head and the edition or title of the magazine at the very top. It is then surrounding the focal point with all of the main topics.
The cover features emotive language just to the left of Ellie saying "The health scare that's changing my life" because of the use of the word 'scare' and 'changing'. It makes the reader feel worried about her and interested to read on about what she's being afraid of. Colloquial language (slang) at the top where it says "Rinsta Or A Finsta" as they're both two shortened down words stuck together that the youth use these days, standing for Real Instagram and Fake Instagram. There are also a lot of exclamation marks being used on the cover to exaggerate the sentences and to make them sound enthusiastic and interesting. "Mode of Address" is also being used on this cover where it says "Amp up your look". The key word in that sentence is 'your' where the magazine is trying to entice the reader to read the magazine by speaking directly to them. There are many more language techniques being used on this cover to persuade people into reading by making them think that it's more interesting than it probably is.

AS1 Task 9 - Bibliography

This post will just be for all of the websites that I have used throughout my AS1 tasks.

The Media: An Introduction. Editors; Adam Briggs and Paul Cobley. Chapter 17 Audience Research by Ray Kent. Longman 2002 ISBN 0-582-42346-5

The Media Magazine. The English and Media Centre. Analysing Still-Image Adverts: Reading Lynx by Mark Ramey. Issue 45, September 2013. ISSN 1478-8616

The Media Magazine. The English and Media Centre. AS Coursework - Charity Adverts by Gavin Luhrs. Issue 9, February 2004.

The Media Magazine. The English and Media Centre. How I Make Things by Garth Jennings on making a TV commercial. Issue 39, February  2012. ISSN 1478-8616

The Media Student's Book 4th Edition, Chapter 9 - Advertising and Branding. Editors; Gill Branston and Roy Stafford: Routledge 2007. ISBN -0-415-37143-0

www.youtube.com

Forms of Television Advertising - http://www.slideshare.net/Lucasjwarren/different-forms-in

Styles of Television Advertising - http://www.slideshare.net/Lucasjwarren/analysing-the-style-of-adverts-26507404

TV advert regulation - http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/advert-code/ad-minutage

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/

https://www.asa.org.uk/?gclid=CjwKEAiArdG1BRCLvs_q-IObwxMSJACXbLtz1E_gCmFSIL4ty9RmDuESIDBmzBHm_zE7Nk6TW-pQLBoClGDw_wcB

Audience Information - http://www.slideshare.net/Lucasjwarren/audience-information-26730685

AS1 Task 8 - Sources of Information In Advertising

You can find a lot of information on television ratings on the internet. This information helps people understand why and how trends in televisions change. Companies may use this information to create their next advert as it shows them what their advert should contain or when the advert should be aired to attract the most relevant target audience. 

Programme profiles give information on how many people watch different television programmes. They give an indicator as to what kind of advert should be aired during the programme so that they would be getting the most amount of viewers during the break. It also allows specific adverts to be aired during programmes that would relate to what people are watching, such as a hygiene product being advertised during a reality tv show, for example.


BARB stands for Broadcasters Audience Research Board. BARB was set up in 1981 to provide the television industry a way of showing a standard audience measurement service for broadcasters and for the television advertising industry. BARB is owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5, BSkyB and the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) and is a not-for-profit company. BARB commissions research companies to provide the types of services that BARB users want or need, even including audience viewing figures which are how many people view a program or advert and when. Audience measurement contracts are held by several other companies including RSMB, Ipsos, MORI and Kantar Media which was formerly known as TNS.

BARB gets its viewer information from box sets linked to the house that is participating with BARB which records what programs are viewed and what people view them when they press a specified button on a remote handset. The data is then published at roughly 9:30am the next morning which can then be used by all TV stations and by the advertising industry itself, be it for use for advertising researchers or just for people to view and record.

Program profiles are broken down sets of data that show the number of people that have viewed a programme. This is useful to an advertiser as they can gather information which can be used to dictate what they would like their advert to be like to attract a wider range or larger number of people. They can also use the information to understand what adverts work best after a certain television programme, such as a Fairy advert being used during some kind of soap programme such as Downton Abbey or something similar.

People also use "rate cards". These show how much it costs to air an advert during a programme, popular programme shown during social hours obviously cost more than unpopular programmes shown during unsocial hours. Since adverts costs quite a lot to be aired, people use several companies to find out if it was worth it. One such company or business is Guerilla Scope. It is a service that is used by people to find out how many people have viewed their advert, but for a view to count they must watch at least 10 seconds, otherwise nothing is recorded.

A lot of advertising information can be found on TV channel websites. They offer programs that give advertisers opportunities to advertise what they want, for a price but with benefits as well. On websites such as https://www.4sales.com/advertising and http://www.itvmedia.co.uk/advertising-opportunities, they give a lot of information on how it works for new advertisers, how much it costs, what it's like and how it works. They offer sponsorships, partnerships and more opportunities. All of this is useful to advertisers as they are given most, if not all of the information that they would need to advertise something. Everything can be found online if they need any more information and all of it is free.

AS1 Task 7 - Audience Information

Advertisers need to study their audiences because they receive important information on what the most effective advert would be and how the audience reacts to their advert. They use this information to sell their products or services to them better and more efficiently as they know what their audience is like and how to sell to them. There are several groups of audiences that the advertisement researchers focus on.

The first is the descriptive research part that researchers focus on and it includes the audiences that are currently being targeted, what their ages are, where they live, where they work or what they work as and so on. This research focuses on the description of the audience being targeted and their characteristics as this tells the researchers how to advertise.

Analytical research seeks to find out the answers to the 'why' and 'how' questions in audiences. The researchers find out what motivates audiences, how, why and what might have caused this.

Predictive research is where researchers consider "what if" situations such as what would happen if the advertising company were to change their name or for example the accessibility of a product. Researchers can then use a theory to their advantage to prevent something bad from happening to their company.

Tracking research is long-term research which monitors any changes to the target audience over a long period of time, for example, how have subscription season ticket sales changed over a period of time or how views may have changed between several series.


Researchers also look at several other factors such as viewer's "standard occupational classification", psychographics, geodemographics, age and gender.

Standard Occupational Classification (social grade) is what jobs the audience has, what their income is and how they get along financially. This is used to class the audience into financial groups to determine what each financial group prefers to watch.

Psychographics this is the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and
lifestyles. It studies interests, activities and opinions. It studies common interests and tries to find trends that people with the same psychographic definition tend to do.

Geodemographics is the research that is conducted on where the audience lives in certain of a country. It uses this information to look at what people in a certain region look at what.

All of this research is conducted to make sure that the company advertises to the correct people in order to get a profit out of their viewers, although this does not always happen. Advertisement researchers divide their audience into these categories so that they know what they can advertise safely without offending anyone and so that they get a wide audience. They can also use the information to learn about the audience to find out specifically what they like so they can easily be persuaded into viewing the advertised product to bring in more revenue.

AS1 Task 6 - Methods of Research

Advertisers always conduct audience research before they create or release an advertisement. It is important to do this so that you can get an understanding of the audience that you would wish to aim your product at, which means that doing this will give you an estimation of the times that the audience that you want to aim your product act will be watching their television and will see your advert. It will also help the company or business to understand what they would need to put into their advert so they attract the viewer's attention.

Primary research is research that is conducted by the person who needs to find it out themselves. It is research that consists of information that has been recorded from questionnaires and other sources of information that the advertisers collected by asking people what they may be watching at what times, what they are interested in and similar things.

An advantage of this kind of research is that you get to explore all previous research that was made by others and see how they conducted their research.

A disadvantage is that it takes a lot of time and you may not always get enough information.

Secondary research is research that the advertiser would use either in addition to their primary research or if they need to get information but they can't get enough primary research and so they need to use information that someone else has collected.

An advantage of using secondary research is that most, if not all of the research has already been conducted by someone else, meaning that you can simply copy or use most of it.

A disadvantage of using secondary research is that you won't know how much of it is true or made up and how they got their results.

Quantitative research is research that uses numbers or statistics. An advertiser would need to use this in order to find out what group of people watch what on their television, what time they watch it, how many times and so on.

An advantage of using quantitative research is that it gives you a lot of information on your audience and what they watch on television.

An disadvantage is that it is not always true as some information may not be updated or it can change whilst you're conducting the research.

Qualitative research is focused more on finer details such as information about where the audience live, what they do as a job, what opinions they have on certain subjects, what their motivations are etc.. 

An advantage of qualitative research is that all of the information that you collect will be written in detail and will have a lot of information based on one thing. For example, if the researcher needs to find information about the type of viewers that they have at the time that their advert would be on at, then they would look at them and then try to find information on what kind of people they are and so on.

A disadvantage is that you may not always find a lot of information on the thing that you need to research and it would take a long time to get all of the information.