Magazine Advert Research - Luke

Before me and the rest of my group start to plan and create the magazine advert, we need to know what the general conventions of a magazine advert for an album are. Seeing as our task is to create a promotional pack for the album an an artist, in our case Madeon, I thought it would be a good idea to look at the conventions of posters and adverts that feature his work and tour dates.

One of the first things that I looked at was the poster for Madeon's first tour. As you can see, there are a lot of bright colours surrounding his name, there is a clear and easy to read layout of text, and there is a banner at the bottom listing his social network web addresses and his record labels. There is also the inclusion of a picture, seemingly of an urban, city environment similar to the one seen in his music video to the song 'The City'.

Looking at some of his digipak covers for his previous EPs and singles, I noticed that there are a lot of links between them.

Firstly, you can see that there font used in all pieces is the same, as is the colour scheme used in and around the font. This is used to create a consistent house style between all of the products, and helps to create a consistent brand/image that can be related to Madeon. This is something that will be key to include in both of our ancillary tasks in order for them to be part of a successful promotional park for Madeon's new album.

One other key aspect that can be seen throughout all of the artwork produced for Madeon is the inclusion or reference to the city. This can be seen through the picture in the tour poster above, and as a silhouette of the Sydney skyline behind the name of the artist in the single/EP artwork. As you can see from the artwork below, there are clear links between them, and this is something we will need to cinsider when planning and constructing our ancillary tasks.
















Even though looking at the work of Madeon is extremely helpful, I still do need to look at the magazine adverts of other artists to see if there are any other conventions that I may have missed. Below is a slideshow of all of the magazine adverts that I have looked at.

As you can see, all of the magazine adverts have very similar features.
They all feature a large title, giving the name of the artist/album. This would stand out giving a clear indication straight away as to who the band or artist is.

There is a photo or graphics/artwork that take up the majority of the advert, something that will catch the readers eye when they see it in a magazine. On Madeon's previous artwork there are no photos, only graphics, so we will keep this trend in our own advert.

The date of the album release is always in clear bold text, as it is one of the most important features, letting the audience know when they can buy the album.

5 star rating systems and short quotes from review of the album are also very common on the advert and are essential to give the artist good publicity.

A new feature which is becoming increasingly popular on magazine adverts is the inclusion of QR codes, and an example of this can be seen in the Goldfrapp advert in the slideshow above. Along with links to the artist's websites/social networks theses are great ways for the audience to be quickly linked to the artists pages.

These features are all key to making a successful magazine advert and we are going to include them all to make sure ours would be as professional as possible.