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

The combination of music video, digipak and website is proven to be a successful promotional campaign for many bands and music artists. If the three are linked clearly then it can lead to huge promotional campaigns. One current example of this is Arctic Monkey’s promotional campaign for their 2013 album AM. There were very clear visual links between the band’s website, the album cover and the music video for the album’s lead single; Do I Wanna Know? This was a helping hand in their rise to one of the biggest bands in the world. We decided that our three tasks should have a visual link, so we decided to select the most important image from the promo and feature it in the digipak. The use of the high heels in the video made reference to the lyrics and we decided that this was the most symbolic image in our promo and that it should feature in some way in the digipak.

 

The front cover of digipak is a still taken from our promo. The shot itself is of the lead guitarist in the performance section of the video and I think it links the video and digipak very well. This is effective in promoting the band as after the audience see the video they may see the image on the cover on iTunes or on CD and instantaneously make the link between the two.

 

Overall I feel that our three media texts are well put together and form the basis of a great promotional tool. There were a few problems that we encountered especially with the digipak. Our first attempt at the digipak was amateurish and looked more like a rough plan of what we wanted to do. There were also several spelling mistakes. Our second Digipak was far better and looks far more professional than its predecessor. A lot of the text remains the same but it is more clearly laid out and the two images used from the promo create a synergetic link. There is also a link to the website as we used images from the website banner.

 

The rise of digital technologies means that band websites are one of the most effective e ways to promote an artist. A good website becomes the hub of all information on the band and is important to the audience as they will expect a lot of information such as biography and tour dates to be found there. Websites are also important for the selling and distribution of merchandise. As the website is so important we felt that ours needed to be easy to navigate and simple for the audience to find everything that they need. Our website is simple and easy but may not be the most aesthetically pleasing for the audience, although there are synergetic links with the other media texts.