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

Having cohesion between the products and its advertisement will help the target audience recognise the product and artist. It can be confusing to have an advertisement that shows sun shine, rainbows and bright colours to promote a heavy metal rock band such as Iron Maiden or Metallica. I think there are some very recognisable abstract links between my main product and ancillary texts. However if I had the opportunity again I would make the synergy between my products more obvious and noticeable.

For the CD inserts and magazine ad I decided to use photos I had available of the band. The photos used on the CD inserts tell us a lot about the Band and what type of genre they are. Indie-Rock tends to use quite simple yet powerful imagery and generally stays away from complicated graphical designs. On the front we see all four band members standing outside a garage door in a group photo where everyone has equal focus (the spend a lot of time practicing inside this garage thus it holds some kind of a sentimental attraction to them). We can see the band members are framed using the brick wall and roof almost like a picture frame; being framed relates to their songs about struggle and feeling insecure or trapped. Also by framing the band together we immediately think of the connection between them (juxtaposition). The band members each hold an identical piece of paper with the name of the band and the song. They use this paper to cover their faces; this implies the band want to be noticed for their music and not their physical appearance. The back of the CD cover uses similar framing and props but we see the fun, creative side of the band by their poses. They seem to be expressing their individuality and a glimpse of their characters in this image. Obviously the target audience may derive different meanings from this image as ‘death of the author’ theory suggests audience don’t have to always get the same message the band wanted to convey as everyone is individual and have their own way of seeing things.

Cohesion between the CD inserts and magazine ad can be seen in the mise-en-scene, props and lighting. The pieces of paper are used in both to display the band’s name. The band members wear similar styles of clothing in both the pictures. And we see how lighting is used in both to create shadows; the shadows relate to the songs and imply about the hidden struggles and dangers in life. The typography used in both has the same font style and binary opposite colours (black and white). The dark colours in the magazine ad also link with the colours used in the ice rink scene and graveyard scene while the brighter (natural lighting) lighting used in the front and back CD covers link with the rest of the narrative scenes. We see a sort of oxymoronic effect where wee see the battle between love and hate, dark and light, reality and imaginary. This is the deeper meaning of my main product and ancillary texts. I believe having a deeper hidden meaning which is not noticeable straight away will be appreciated by the audience to greater degree when they recognise it. This is using the Audience Gratification theory which implies the audience are not passive viewers and they challenge the media they view; this is contradictory to the hypodermic needle model which says the audience are influenced by the media where they simply take in anything and everything said by the media passively.