Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Vicki Cook

Vicki Cook

The target audience for our documentary is young adults and teenagers as we thought that these are the most common ages that people do tend to binge drink.Our target audience are most likely to be students and/or part time workers from middle class back grounds. Our three pieces of work are aimed at both males and females

Vicki Cook

The documentary would be shown on channel 4 as this channel usually has the more entertaining documentaries whereas ITV1 and BBC tend to have much more serious ones. Channel 4 is also a channel which is a lot more appealing to young adults and teenagers because of the other shows that they show, as they have music, comedies and dramas all aimed at this age range.

The radio trailer would be aired on Capital FM as the music on this station is mainly modern music and attracts a lot of the target audience that we want to aim the documentary at.

The same ideas go with the TV guide that we chose for our article. What’s on TV is a more friendly and entertaining TV guide so would appeal to our target audience much more than other TV guides.

So all three products attract the target audience through these three ways of distributing media products as they all appeal to the target audience that we want.

Vicki Cook

One of the most simple and obvious ways we

could combine the pieces of work was to repeat the

name of the documentary in all three products at least once.The title appears after

the first few opening clips in the documentary, it

appears at the top of the TV article and is said at

the end of our radio trailer so that it sticks in

the audiences head.

We felt that the white text with a black outline stood out more than just black or white text and used it on both the article and the documentary as it would be recognisable

Although to improve this recognisable title we could’ve used the blue and red text in the documentary instead of just in the TV article.

Vicki Cook

To link the Documentary with the Radio trailer we used some of the clips from the Vox pops and Interviews from the documentary in the Radio trailer. We chose the more entertaining ones as well so that the audience would be drawn into the radio trailer and then want to watch the documentary. We did the same with the background music using the same for both, the background music would then be recognisable and always be related to our documentary as it is basically the theme tune to our documentary. Although we used a different narrator for both pieces of work. We should’ve used the same narrator to continue to have more similarities between the Documentary and the radio trailer.

Vicki Cook

Also the music in both the documentary and radio trailer sounds very upbeat and modern and very similar to the music in which our target audience is most likely to listen to rather than older audiences. The language used in all three media products is good but it’s not really complex like some documentaries use therefore that makes It good for all target audiences although it makes it ideal for the audience that we want for our products. Also by simply interviewing the target audience for the Vox pops just makes our documentary ideal for the target audience as they will hear the views that they are likely to agree with

Vicki Cook

We also used bits of the documentary in the TV guide article to keep the idea of linking the texts with each other. We did consider having just images of drunk people and alcohol but that wouldn’t of connected it so instead we got interesting screen shots from the actual documentary and put it into our article. The screen shots we chose also related to our audience as at least two of the images were of people that are the age of the target audience so when reading the article they can see that people their age are in the documentary which should make them want to watch it. We also did include some screen Shots of interesting alcohol images such as ones from the bar. We also included serious ones such as the Police officer and the hospital which would show the audience that the documentary does also have a serious side as well as a fun side without even reading the text.

Vicki Cook

Overall I think we have made a decent link with all of our media products, although I think it could’ve been possibly improved just a little bit with just a few simple changes, such as making the titles on the Documentary and the TV article match and having the same narrator for both the Documentary and the Radio trailer. Plus a few other changes such as maybe introducing a colour scheme for the TV article to match the Titles and Sub titles in the Documentary. I also think we have thought very well about making sure that our products are ideal for our target audience and there is very little I would want to change to make it even more appealing for them.