Ancillary Task 2: Magazine Advert - Analysis

Having started on the digipak album cover, and working hard on that, it is time to start looking at the other ancillary task - the magazine advert.
Now, there is a very specific reason that we decided to save the magazine advert until second in the ancillary tasks work - the magazine advert analysis we had conducted so far showed that there was one key pattern in abundance; the magazine advert, more often than not, followed directly the artwork to the album it was promoting. The advert is designed to give an early preview and exposure to a newly-released album, and therefore they often use the artwork of the new album in abundance. A great example is shown here with Hard-Fi's 2007 album, 'Once Upon A Time In The West'. Below is the album cover itself, and alongside it is a magazine advert from the time promoting the album.

As you can see, the artwork for the advert is almost identical to the artwork for the album itself, with the one spin being that the message on the album cover (NO COVER ART.) is modified to suit the advert (NO POSTER ART.). Almost everything is identical, from colours, to fonts, to mode of address. And it isn't just in the rock music genre that this is prevelant - below is an example I found, using Gwen Stefani's 'Love. Angel. Music. Baby.' album and promo advert to illustrate the point.



Now, Gwen Stefani is about as far away from the rock genre as you can get - this album is firmly in the mainstream, electro-pop type genre, so this demonstrates that this technique and convention is far from unique to any one genre.

There are, however, of course, some unique conventions and aspects to magazine adverts, which we will look to incorporate in our advert. They include:

• Heavy usage of the band name
• Sometimes the usage of an imperative ('Buy it now')
  
• The artist's name takes more of a precedant than it perhaps would do on the album cover design - note how Hard-Fi's logo is larger on the advert than it is on the album cover itself
• A small preview of the album cover itself is often shown to show viewers what to look out for when buying the album
• Details are often included about released or to-be-released singles from the album
• the release date of the album is almost always featured in some aspect
• the price can sometimes be featured, but often isn't
• details of various versions of the album are included, for example, if there are regular and deluxe editions of the album, both will be featured on the advert.
• If the artist has a website, this is often featured.

We'll look at all of this and look to mix in the album artwork with all of these conventions, plus any more we feel appropriate.

More to come...