Evaluation Question 3:How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Q3) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In both, the magazine advert and the digi-pak we used images taken from within the music video, or photographs taken at the time of filming.

As a group, we felt that this was the most effective way of familiarising our audience with these images and henceforth would encourage them to buy it.

Synergy therefore took place causing our products to proliferate.

This was something I particularly noticed when collecting audience feedback; once somebody had seen the digi-pak, and knew we had also created a magazine advert and a music video- they wanted to see all of our products, and vice versa.

From my research I know that this is a reflection of how it works in the 'real world' because sales of CDs increase with advertisements, and the release of music videos.

I think that this is because some people may only read magazines, some people may only watch the music channels, and some people may only listen to the radio- therefore by using synergy we are allowing a bigger range of people to access our media products.

We chose to use a six page digi-pak, rather than simply a CD cover sleeve, because we felt that it added value to the product as it was more visually pleasing for the buyer; in an age like today, where mp3 downloads are much more popular, increasing the value of CDs is increasingly important to encourage sales. 

Our music video is simple and this is reflected in both of our ancillary products. This helps to create a theme and, again, helps to increase the familiarity of the music video and song- and therefore sales additionally.

I think that our use of conventions in the combination of our ancillary products and our music video is very effective because we are targeting a wide audience by breaking some conventions, whilst being careful to conform to others as to appeal to existing 'fans'.

When planning the creation of each aspect- the music video, the DigiPak and the magazine advert- we went back to the song, and Coldplay's existing products to look at the conventions and techniques used.

We found that many of the same ideas appeared in our mind-maps each time; this is also how, in almost every single case, Coldplay's existing main products and the ancillary texts were linked. I think this is why our combination and synergy was so effective.