2.How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?

Within in our main product and ancillary text we really wanted to link the three together. We hoped that somebody could watch out trailer and then see our poster or magazine and understand how they complement each other. I believe we did create an effective link between them by using various different marketing techniques.

A major contributing factor to an effective combination between a main product and ancillary text is a strong unique selling point (USP). A USP is something that should be present on all of the marketing material as it helps combine the three products. Most existing media products adopt a USP to help market their movie. For example the movie ‘Haunting in Connecticut’ uses the fact that it is ‘based on true events’ as its USP and therefore features the phrase on all of its media text including movie trailer and poster. This helps the audience to therefore combine the individual products. The USP for our marketing campaign was the highlighted importance of a ‘date - 19-11-11’. Through our three media we tried to communicate that ‘something’ is going to happen on this date which should therefore intrigue a wide audience to question, what is going to happen? This factor makes our marketing campaign unique as it is all majorly based around this date. One way in which we achieved this was by always allowing the date a predominant space on the media. For example in the trailer it has a whole shot to itself and in our magazine it covers the majority of the knife image. We also made sure that the date always had its own colour pallet associated with it. For example in all three of my media products ’19-11-11’ has mostly been in a dark bloody red. This colour is not only commonly associated with the horror genre but it also means it stands out within the media. By doing all of this this it forces the audience to notice it more which consequently means they are more likely to remember it when they see another one of our media products.

Another effective way in which we combined our main product with our ancillary text was through the use of images, videos and fonts used. For example the title of our film ‘The Last Date’ was edited in the same font throughout all of our media. Although it seems like a simple thing to do it subconsciously allows the audience to link the three products together. We also used this technique further by using the same font for the taglines in all three media also. Once again this just reinforces the idea that they are all combined. A similar effect is achieved by using similar images and shots on all three products also. We wanted to make sure that an audience member could link the two ancillary texts to the main product. We did this by using images in our magazine and poster that an audience have seen in the trailer. For example the knife in our trailer features in our magazine front cover also. This then allows an audience to understand that the two are combined.

Furthermore, another way in which we insured all of our three media texts combined was by actually using the ancillary text in our main product. For example within our film trailer we used the same image that we used for our film poster. We dedicate 3s of our media trailer to a quick montage of the same image both edited and non-edited. By doing this we are directly linking our ancillary text to our main product and establishing our own marketing strategy. It also means that an audience member can easily identify the link between the three products if they fail to notice the other subtle factors that combine them.