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

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

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Brand Identity and MarketingBrand identity is the way companies want to be perceived by consumers. They often have a specific look which represents their brand, which is shown through: imaging, name, logo and tagline. In our task, brand identity was particularly important in ensuring that each of our three products connected and made sense in correspondence with each other.Brand identity is particularly important in successfully marketing a product. Marketing is the process and action of promoting/selling products or services. Having a strong and powerful brand identity makes marketing your product easier, and the end results more successful.

Here are some examples of Brand Identity within film campaigns:

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Understanding Brand Identity Real Media ExamplesTo completely understand brand identity in the role of marketing, I researched into the real media campaign for the film Warm Bodies. This is a thriller/comedy, so not exactly matching our films genre but including various features which could be inspirational to our marketing campaign. I will be discussing the marketing campaign for Warm Bodies and how that established their brand identity, and how researching this helped to influence how effective our media products were.The unique selling point of the film Warm Bodies, was a combination of its genre a comical thriller, and its inclusion of zombies and romance. They mainly presented this unique selling point through use of colours and taglines through their marketing campaign. They released a series of posters throughout their campaign which I would agree was one of their most effective forms of promotion.

Warm Bodies Brand Identity through Marketing Here are some examples of how they showed their brand identity within the marketing campaign through posters:

Use of Slogans: The slogans they used throughout their posters, relate to the main character being a zombie and the romantic connection that is revealed throughout the film. This shows their brand identity of creating an unusual zombie romance.Use of 3 main colours: Within the posters the use of red, white and dark grey is repeated. This helps to establish a particular aesthetic look helping the audience to recognise their film and campaign. The colours theyve chosen have been picked carefully to represent certain things. For example: red in this film represents the dead zombies, and the process of this zombie coming back to life.Visual Imaging: The imaging used throughout the marketing campaign consistently shows the two main characters. This perfectly represents the brand identity of romance between two unlikely partners.

Warm Bodies Brand Identity through Marketing Here are some examples of how they showed their brand identity within the marketing campaign through publicity magazines, interviews etc:

Interview with the two main actors:Although this feature of the Warm Bodies marketing campaign is different to anything we had to create, it is still successful in keeping the films brand identity. Using a red and black background for the interview corresponds with the colours used throughout the campaign. Additionally, by displaying a poster on the wall during the interview allows the audience to connect the real life actors to the characters within the film. In this interview in particular, they have chosen to just interview the main characters. I believe this makes this part of the marketing campaign successfully as it is showcasing the main two characters from the film and therefore suggesting their key importance.

Warm Bodies Brand Identity through Marketing Here are some examples of how they showed their brand identity within the marketing campaign through publicity magazines, interviews etc:Review:As this film Warm Bodies was not actually chosen to feature on a magazine cover like our film, Ive chosen to look at an review done by TIME magazine. Although what is said isnt chosen by the marketing team, due to their successful marketing of the films brand identity the review picks up on the key aspects of the film.

Simply referring to the character as a zombie shows that the whole campaign has successfully shown this character and role within the film.These sentences refer to the use of clever lines within the movie which show the main characters thought process. As the reviewer is mainly commenting on the movie, from interpretation you can gather that this mirrors the use of clever tag lines within the campaigns posters. Those lines also mimic the main characters thoughts, and signify key themes within the film.

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Warm Bodies Brand Identity through Marketing Here are some examples of how they showed their brand identity within the marketing campaign through Teaser Trailers:

A trailer is one of the main ways that a film can really showcase its brand identity. Within the teaser for Warm Bodies it features: zombies, use of internal monologue and one liners, the 3 main colours and the element of romance through the main characters.Double click to watch Zombies

A large majority of the characters shown in the teaser are zombies. This successfully showcases the theme of zombies in the film.Romance

This screen recording is just one example of how they show romance within the teaser. Throughout the teaser clips are shown similar to this to showcase the romantic connection between the zombie and the girl.

Our Media Products and Brand Identity

Magazine CoverTeaser Trailer double click to watchFilm PosterHere are our three final products. I believe our products were very successful in showcasing a particular brand identity. Our genre was a thriller and we definitely based a lot of our visual decisions on the genre. Our unique selling point of our film was our characters split persona. One part of the character was a regular teenage boy who enjoyed writing, the other side to him was a devil-like character. Therefore we focused a lot of our brand identity on character imagery. We did want to show a split personality, however we also didnt want to entirely reveal what two sides the character had to him. We represented our brand identity and unique selling point of the film, through dark colours, shadows and facial imagery. I will breaking each product down into the key features which represented our brand identity in the next slides.

Comparing Real Media to Our Media Products

Our film poster has many components to it which showcase our brand identity and make it a successful product. The visual imagery was a very important part of the poster. It shows our main character, with a layered face. Showing him face on openly shows the audience his character. However, through use of shadowing half of his face fades into black. This represents the idea of a split personality. Another feature which represents our brands identity is use of colour. Our key colour palette used was red, grey and black. The red is used to represent the devil and the idea of blood and danger. Through layering a very subtle red eye has been added onto the right side of the characters face, this represents the devil character in a secretive way through colour. The grey is used to represent mystery and the black to represent the unknown. Additionally, our tag line is used to give a hint to the idea of the devil which takes over our main character. I believe this poster is an effective product, holding all of the main components a film poster should use, whilst also showcasing our brand identity.In comparison to this film poster for Warm Bodies, I believe our poster works successfully. Just like this Warm Bodies film poster, colour has been used intentionally to give a particular message. Additionally use of visual imagery is used in both posters to represent a theme within the film and throughout the campaign. In the poster for Warm Bodies the image represents the theme of romance and zombies. In our film poster, the image represents the theme of a split hidden persona.

Comparing Real Media to Our Media Products

This is our films cover feature that we created for Empire Magazine. In my opinion I believe that this magazine cover showcases our films brand identity but in a more subtle way than our poster. The use of our main features of visual imagery and specific colour palettes are used to show the brand identity of the film. However, they arent as prominent as on the film poster. For the magazine cover we chose a close up image of our main character. This allowed the audience to connect with the character, and begin to recognise the facial imagery. To keep the idea of a split persona, we used this close up photograph which incorporated very deep shadows on the right side of the face. This is the aspect which suggests a lose of true persona, and creates mystery into who our main character really is. In terms of use of colour, red and black are primarily used on the magazine cover. We kept the background black in order to keep focus on the image, and use red writing throughout the cover to link into the colours used on our film poster. However, the use of white and yellow colouring in the magazine cover slightly takes away from our colour scheme. I believe this magazine cover is an effective product, and does showcase brand identity. However, the brand identity is not as strong here as on our films poster.As the Warm Bodies film does not have a magazine cover I can compare our films cover to, I will focus on another film poster that they used for advertising. Within this film poster for Warm Bodies, they have used a slightly different colour palette to the main set of posters. This is similar to our magazine cover which incorporates a slightly different range of colours to our film poster. A big part of this second film poster for Warm Bodies is the visual imagery. This shows a close up to the main characters in the film, which is the same technique we used for our magazine cover.

Comparing Real Media to Our Media Products

In a similar way to the Warm Bodies campaign, our teaser trailer is one of the main forms of marketing for our film. It allows us to showcase the main themes of our film and the brand identity through moving image. Focusing on the three main elements which helped to create our brand identity: colour, visual/facial imagery and shadowing, I will be showing and discussing examples of where these appear in our teaser. Double click to watch our teaser.

Facial Imagery:Within our teaser trailer we used a mixture of facial imagery of our main character. Whether this was side or front profile view, we showed him throughout our teaser in a mysterious way. I believe this was effective in order to stimulate the idea of their being mystery behind our main character. We never kept the clips to long when showing our main character. This is because we only wanted to hint his characteristics to the audience so they could start to ponder on the different traits of his character. Showing the main character throughout the films teaser trailer is vital in order to establish who the main feature of the film is. I believe we have done this successfully, as in Warm Bodies the main character is also shown throughout.

Warm Bodies Facial Imagery:

Comparing Real Media to Our Media Products

Use of Shadows:Use of Colour: Just as in Warm Bodies for our trailer and promotional products we chose to use three main colours which were used throughout. This not only link our products together, but created memorable visuals for the audience to remember. Our main colour palette included red, black and grey. Red being the key colour, represented the idea of the devil and death. We even incorporated the colour scheme into our ident (shown above), in order carry the colour scheme through the entire teaser. This made our teaser effective in suggesting our brand identity, as use of particular colours influenced the ideas and motives behind the film idea. This can be compared to the chosen colour scheme in Warm Bodies. There main colours were red, white and black. However, their use of the colour red represented romance instead of death like our film. Another element of our brand identity and image, which we kept across our promotional products, was the use of shadows. In our teaser trailer these were particularly prominent in order to disguise the main characters face, and create mystery behind who are character really was. This helped to make our teaser trailer a successful product by suggest the idea of there being more to our main character than it seems. This can be comparable to the Warm Bodies teaser in the way they use blue toned lighting to emphasise the idea of the dead characters within the movie. Its implications are subtle but link successfully into the main character of the film.

Magazine CoverTeaser TrailerFilm PosterThe Combination of Our Media ProductsOverall, how effective is the combination of our main product and ancillary texts?I believe overall our products were very successful, both individual and in combination. Each product carried the same ideas, and reflected themes and genre throughout in similar ways. I would say they main three reoccurring themes in the three separate products were use of shadows, facial imagery and a specific colour palette of red, black and grey. Although the magazine slightly swayed away from the specific colour palette, it did incorporate our main colour of red. I definitely believe the products link to each other effectively, and are clearly connected. I do believe the teaser trailer is the leading and most successful part of our promotional package, however both the magazine cover and poster effectively connect to the teaser and promote our brand identity as a whole.