What I have learnt through audience feedback
MUSIC VIDEO audience feedback
Most importantly: It is okay to take inspiration from other products and artists! As long as you are not literally copying then the audience seem to like it and put your artist on a comparable level with the artist you imitated. We had so many compliments about how our artist's costume, makeup, and overall brand image reminded them of Taylor Swift! With NO complaints of copying.
Secondly, audiences enjoy seeing variety within music videos (for example costume changes) - However they must have a clear link and not be totally random to show that the artist is in a certain niche (indie) and therefore give the impression that Eva Ellis really knows what she is doing.
Surprisingly! Almost as soon as an audience views a music video, they are already expecting and awaiting the rest of the promotional products to look similar. When we asked what they'd expect to see on the digipak of the artist in our video, most mentioned natural locations, and the same makeup and colours again. This is exactly what I did when it came to producing my ancillary products! Gave the consumers what they wanted
Both the good and bad comments on my ancillary have taught me many things.
Firstly, whether a viewer is already a fan or not - they like to see effort put into recreating the stereotypical conventions of products (when Doanne says the CD inside the digipak doesn't look 'right' because I made it transparent. It is not something that consumers are relatable with as they are not familiar with seeing this - Therefore I learnt that although you have to make your artist unique to stand out, there is a limit with the conventional packaging and promotions that you have to follow for them to be accepted and taken seriously as a product on the market.
Moreover, I came to realise from these viewers feedback that when fitting products to the core target audience you have to be very specific and try not to stray too far from the things that will appeal to your audience (for example the subtle makeup making young girls aspire to Eva Ellis' beauty) - I think that the secret is to not try to please everybody, as we may have done. When I asked who our target audience was, Whitney ^ replied that she believed it was males - this may be because we used so many elements to entice the male gaze (red lips, red texts, skirts, shots of legs) that we accustomed so many things to males that we forgot about who our MAIN target audience was (females). So I learnt to keep your products specific to who you originally thought would buy it, as no product will please everybody anyway.
Lastly, this made me realise the importance of synergy even more! Sometimes it felt like we were putting so much effort into perfecting and continuing the synergy but people might not even notice. WELL - from feedback it's clear that they do! It has become clear that visual links of an artist's brand image are subconsciously stored in the audience's brain. Which is good because it doesn't look like the producers are trying too hard to create a perfect person. As soon as I asked what the synergy links were, everybody knew (red lips, guitar, natural locations) - This means that whether people like the artist/genre or not, the image will still be memorable to them, therefore leading to an increased amount of artist recognition, and possibility of unlikely fans being drawn to the products through memory.
Although I learnt a lot through my research and planning and tried to project this knowledge of music promoting/advertising in my products, nothing is more helpful and eye-opening than having a second opinion from somebody viewing it for the first time. So I set out to pick some people within my target audience (teenage females) to comment on what they liked, maybe didn't like, and find out what pieces work successfully or not (for example whether they noticed our elements of synergy).
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