Advertising in media.

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Media Coursework- Advertising

For my Media Coursework, I have chosen to look at advertising. This covers a very large spectrum, from small one-off advertisements in a newspaper to gigantic campaigns being advertised on the television and radio all the time. I have chosen to specifically look at television marketing, and have decided to both study the development of commercials and the end product of existing commercials, by giving myself the task of working for a made up advertising agency (i.e. Xperimental Works Limited.) for an imaginary ‘alcoholic drink’ company called ‘Q2’.

In the advertising world, what would happen would be that Q2, after producing their merchandise, would then come to an advertising agency and explain their needs and their target receivers of the commercial to a team of creatively minded experts. Then usually the next step would be for the advertising team to go away and prepare a bunch of different ideas to show the ‘client’ (i.e. Q2 in this case). After seeing the ideas, the client would then decide which ideas suited the image that the company was looking for and which were definitely going down the wrong route. If the client is not pleased with any of the initial ideas it is their prerogative to either, tell the advertising company more what it is looking for and ask for a new outlook on the campaign or, if they are not satisfied with where it is going at all, to simply scrap the deal and try another advertising agency. This may seem a very ruthless and an incredibly competitive business. It is! However, when considering the amount of money that firms plough into advertising on the television alone nowadays, it becomes clearer why companies need to get it right. Also, it is quite surprising how much a good or a bad advertising campaign can have on a company’s success. With a good advertising drive, an old fashioned, inconspicuous medicine firm can change it’s image to become, ‘hip’, ‘trendy’ and most importantly of all successful. This example of how the, now-fizzy drink company, ‘Lucozade’, changed its image from being a dull type of medicine in the 1950-60’s to being a fun and exciting energy drink today. This change in the people’s perception of  the drink has been brought about, largely by one thing: advertising. ‘Lucozade’s’ commercials used to be in the breed of advert that consisted of what I like to call ‘The Stereotypical, 1950’s Housewife Commercials’. These were the first type of commercials and back in the 1950’s-60’s they were the large majority of what television marketing consisted of. They were black and white, and usually had (depending on whether they be British or American) either a very well spoken man with an English accent or a typically all-American man’s voice as a voice over. Actually on screen would be the ‘stereotypical housewife’, a white woman usually in her late 30’s, washing up, or cleaning, always with a nice smile, a beautiful complexion, set in a very middle class house, with soft music playing in the background. These commercials seemed to play on stereotypes and definitely reflected the political status of men and women at the time. Not only is there never a man in any advert that is on the subject of cleaning, children, or general housework (unless it is showing a man earning the money necessary to buy the product for his wife to use or other scenarios that by today’s standards would seem unacceptably politically incorrect), but also it clearly shows the position of different races on the television, back in the ’50’s and ’60’s. Black people would virtually never be on British advertisements until the early 1970’s and would rarely be on American commercials unless insinuating that the person was some kind of servant or cook to the middle class family being portrayed. Lucozade’s commercials were no exception; they consisted of the stereotypical housewife, usually nursing a sick child of about 9-11, the soft music and an Englishman with ‘received pronunciation’, explaining why Lucozade is ‘ . . .simply the best way to relieve a nasty cold’. This was fairly successful for what it was, a type of medicine, but soon, ‘Beechams’ (the company who owns Lucozade) decided to change what Lucozade was from a soothing, dull remedy for saw throats to a sports drink, that they would try to target at young people. It was not really a sudden change but a gradual one that took a long time and many different campaigns. However, in 1999 their latest campaign came out and it was a huge success. They did something that had never been done before in the U.K. They used the technology of Computer Generated Images to have a famous video game character to market their drink. Lara Croft (the star or a game called Tomb Raider) was the saviour of Lucozade. Not only could the new breed of video-game playing youngsters relate to the new drink, but it also had the name ‘Sports Drink’ attached to it and so, it appealed to an even wider variety of people. The Lara Croft campaign is still running today and Lucozade is incredibly successful.

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It is for this reason that when thinking of how to market a new ‘Alco pop’ for Q2, one of my initial ideas is to use some kind of famous character who young people can relate to.

The briefing given to us by Q2 is that they are looking to target people between the ages of 18-30 (however, always being aware that ‘ . . . persons below the age of 18 should never be discarded when considering how to market the product ’). Also that they are looking for a trendy image to portray the ‘soave, coolness’ of the ...

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