LO3: How does my campaign meet trends of advertising

Explain using examples from existing media how your campaign meets the current conventions and trends in existing advertising, within your industry.

My campaign follows trends and conventions of similar products in the industry, for example Waterstone's campaigns. Most book shops all advertise their products in similar ways, focusing on the novels they're selling and how they can cater them to their correct target audience. Some of the ways they do this is through print, web, and audio visual advertisements. These medias, despite being different, all employ the same house style and visuals in order to keep their campaign consistent, as consistency is very important in advertising, in order for brand recognition and for the brand to properly target their desired demographic. For example, highlighting their bestsellers to engage audiences by making the brand feel friendly and reliable, as these products would be popular with other customers, therefore maybe popular with them too. Additionally, using the concept of advertising their "bestsellers" also makes the brand feel more personal which is appealing to audience. My campaign therefore meets the current conventions and trends as I oriented my campaign also about the brand's bestsellers. Furthermore, I aimed to emphasize my client's bright and vibrant house style and engaging visuals in the campaign, by keeping the visuals and aesthetics consistent across the entire campaign, as this is something that is very stereotypical and therefore follows common codes and conventions of similar products in this industry. This ensures that the campaign feels familiar, due to following these conventions, but also unique, due to the employment of my client's house style and pre-existing branding. 

Poster

An existing billboard / poster from Waterstones, this print advertisement celebrates their bestsellers, and aims to engage readers and customers, by boasting about their huge catalog to audiences. This type of advertising is very conventional for bookshops, and so I used a similar approach in my own campaign. Celebrating my client's bestsellers in my poster, whilst using their branding and house style for branding. I also added in my client's other socials and their location, as they're not as prolific and established as massively famous bookshops such as Waterstones are. By using PNG's of their bestsellers, it enables an audience to feel more connected to the campaign as it gives them something to relate to, as they may have read or may be familiar with these novels. It also makes the poster more legible and cohesive, as it's not a list of the bestsellers but instead a visual representation of them, which is more engaging and also more easily picked up on if the general public glance at the poster. This meets common trends of advertising for posters, as they need to be visually appealing with little writing so as to not bore the audience, and so that they're properly taken in and absorbed by them very quickly, as people usually see posters whilst they're in the rush.

Web banner

An example of an existing web banner in the industry would be Waterstone's children's book prize winners. Here, they used a very vibrant rainbow colour scheme and house style to appeal to their target audience of young children. The font, visuals and colour scheme all help the web banner attract this young audience, but also to attract the secondary audience of parents. These parents would most likely actually be the ones who see this web banner online, as many children wouldn't be surfing the internet. The parents would see the bright colours, childish font, and the stereotypical children's book front covers, and be drawn to it if they have children of a similar age. They can then use this web banner to 'find out more' about the children's book prize for Waterstones, proving that arguably parents are the primary audience of this campaign material. For my web banner, I met these trends of advertising by ensuring I established brand identity with my colour scheme but also ensured It would appeal to my target audience. I used lots of visuals on my web banner as this conventionally too, as users are more drawn to visual heavy web banners as it needs to quickly pique their interest as they're scrolling online. I included their socials and address to help establish brand identity. I also ensured their logo was the largest thing on the web banner as this ensured users would know which brand it was for, and their name including 'books' helps users to understand what type of brand they are. Furthermore, I ensured to have a persuasive phrase on the page as this would be what tempts audiences to click on the web banner. I changed the stereotypical 'find out more' to instead match more thematically with the fact that my client was a book shop, incorporating 'turn another page' to work as essentially a pun. This enables me to engage my audience, whilst being persuasive, meeting the trends of advertising.

Audio Visual product

 

To ensure my AV product met current trends of advertising, I used Waterstone's promotional video that highlights the novels they sell, and the current promotions they have. Following their similar digital method of advertising, I made my video completely digitally, using similar front covers of the novels to easily engage my audience, and meet trends of advertising. I also added branding at the end of the video, to ensure it not only met these trends of advertising, but also properly promoted my client to my audience. I also made my video rather short as this is conventional for a short promotional audio visual product, for example, Waterstones is only 21 seconds thus I made my video around 20 seconds long too. By only making my audio visual product use the front covers of novels that are either their bestsellers, certain genres and in their book clubs, this ensures the campaign is very consistent and cohesive.