Looking at and analyzing three holiday brochure extracts.

Media Coursework

For this coursework I will be looking at and analyzing three holiday brochure extracts. The first, “Club 18-30” is aimed at a target audience of people aged eighteen to thirty who are interested in more of a clubbing, party oriented holiday. The second, “Superfamily” is aimed at families, or more specifically, parents. The third extract, “Forever Young” is aimed toward to the older generation or people who want a more relaxed, calm, sight seeing style of holiday. Selling a holiday to the target audience is the main aim of the three companies who designed and advertised the brochures. For this reason the brochures may appear ‘spiced up’ in order to make them seem more appealing to the target audience.

Pictures are used in all three holiday brochure extracts. This is done for two reasons. The first being to break up the text in order to make it more appealing to the eye. A holiday with text and a picture looks far more appealing than a brochure with only solid blocks of text. The second reason is to give an example of what you might expect to experience if you were to purchase a holiday from them. The picture in the “Club 18-30” brochure shows ‘young’ people smiling, laughing and having a good time, presumably in a night club or at a party of some sort. This is done, as it is likely that that would be the sale purpose of the holiday to the target audience. The picture in the “Superfamily” brochure displays a section of the accommodation, the hotel pool area and most importantly, all members and generations of a family enjoying themselves in the same environment. This shows the target audience that the holiday is suitable for every member of the family. The third extract entitled “Forever Young” is the only one of the three brochures that contains two pictures, The first being as mentioned in the text, as a “beautiful gothic cathedral” giving the target audience a taste of the beautiful sites Majorca has to offer. The second photograph displays the accommodation and a less crowded pool area with no children. The fact that there are no children shows that this particular holiday isn’t child/family orientated.

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Heading let the reader know with a quick glance what the brochure is about. Although all three of the holiday brochure extracts have the same heading, (Majorca), they each have it written in a different way. In the “Club 18-30” extract, the heading is completely written in lower case and is in a wonkey, un-even font. The fact that it is wonkey relates to the main purpose of the holiday to the target audience, to go clubbing and get drunk having a good time. The wonkey style writing relates to the way people walk and move when they are intoxicated. In the “Superfamily” extract the heading is written on the left side of the page within a wavy style design. The wavy design simulates the beach and the waves crashing against it. This implants the scene of the beach into the reader’s mind, as they are most likely to spend time at the beach during their holiday. Also, the first letter of the heading is in higher case, while the rest is in lower case. The first letter of the heading in the “Forever Young” extract is also higher case while the rest of the letters are lower case. I would describe the heading in the “Forever Young” as plain, to the point and, compared to the other brochures headlines, civilized, much like the target audience of the brochure.

Sub-headings are used to break down the text into more manageable segments and help to categorize different bits of information. The “Club 18-30” brochure contains five sub-headings all written in the same wonkey style font as the heading, again to simulate the drunken movement effect. There are several sub-headings in the “Superfamily” brochure, each used to summarize different sections of texts. Again, sub headings are used to summarize sections of text in the “Forever Young” brochure.

Bullet points are used in two of the three extracts, “Superfamily” and “Forever Young”. They are used in order to break up the text and to make the brochure more appealing to the eye. In the “Superfamily” extract bullet points are used to further break down text within sub- heading by listing information about “Children’s Clubs”, “Family Time” and “Baby Care”. Rather than just saying that they offer those facilities, they have given specific information about each. This shows the reader that more time has been spent on giving more detailed descriptions on what is most important to the target audience, that their children are kept entertained and looked after properly. The bullet points in the “Forever Young” extract are also used to further break down the text in order to give more information to the reader. In this extract, bullet points are used to give a more detailed description of the “Location, “Facilities” and “Activities”. These are what are most important to the target audience. The fact that there are no bullet points in the “Club 18-30” brochure shows that specific information about things like accommodation and facilities is not that important to the target audiences.

Different styles of language are used in order to appeal to a certain type of a person/target audience. In the “Club 18-30” brochure lots of slang words, abbreviations and phrases are used, such as “tons”, “going down”, “fab”, “nuff said”, ”’em”, “don’t suit” and “in yer face”.