Participatory Online News Task

For this task, I chose to comment on a news about 'slavery' by The Daily Telegraph. Slavery is a very controversial human rights topic and I believe everyone should have their voices heard regarding their opinions over this inhumane topic. This article discusses how African people are being forced to move out of their countries illegally in order to run away from being held slaves and to survive. This is not just an issue for Africa but a global crises. Slavery is a way of limiting the human progression and this should not be left unseen.

Maybelline New York's Marketing Campaign(s)

Maybelline has adopted several promotional plans for its products in the beauty industry. In 2014, Maybelline collaborated with 13 influential YouTube beauty vloggers to promote the Nudes Palette.

"Dare to Go Nude" was Maybelline's video campaign to encourage women around the world to consider nude eyeshadow shades as a bold new way to express their true selves. It was the brand's unique way of bringing its newest product to the market and was successful in creating excitement within its target audience as well as raising consumer awareness about the product.

Maybelline realises the impact of star power on common masses. This was seen in its YouTube campaign as it approached beauty vloggers who had pre-existing followers, which made it easier for Maybelline to persuade its audience about the product's worth. Furthermore, it took over the YouTube homepage on product launch day and executed multiple high-impact site takeovers on the same day, leading to a rise in consumer awareness as well as 'desire to buy'.

The campaign succeeded by getting the right content in front of the right YouTube audiences. It resulted in 140 million impressions and 1.46 million clicks via the YouTube Masthead takeover as well as 15 million impressions via Google Preferred.

Technological Convergence and Branding

A brand is a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name e.g. Disney, Apple, Google etc. Brand is not just about a logo, marketing, advertising or a corporate identity. It is about confidence, passion, belonging, action and security; a set of unique values. Many things can be branded such as products, services, people, places, religions etc. Branding guarantees quality and evokes desires. Branding leads to an interaction between prosumers and consumers as prosumers try to satisfy their customers' demands by coming up with technological convergence. Technological convergence can be defined as the coming together of media technologies. An example of this would be the invention of Web 2.0. Web 1.0 was created in 1996 and there were only 250,000 websites with 90% of published content, however, majority of Web 2.0's content is user generated and it operates more than 80,000,000 websites. 

Furthermore, technological conventions have been profitable for the film industry because it is an accessible platform for almost everyone, everywhere. It has led to an easier and quicker way of advertising films, and it also allows consumers to watch films at cheaper prices. 

PRELIM TASK- Target Audience Consent Form

PRELIM TASK- My Final Product!!!!!

PRELIM TASK- Overview by Me!

Hey,
In this post I will be overviewing the final product of my preliminary task and talk about the choices I made for my magazine cover.
First of all, my masthead is called 'Blue Tunes' and as I mentioned in my previous posts that my magazine theme is R&B with soul music hence, I chose 'blue' which represents purity and innocence; resembles soul. And I chose 'tunes' for R&B.
I would now like to talk about the coverlines. Before starting my prelim task, I deconstructed a magazine cover which had Adele as its main feature. Adele music form is mainly R&B and soul and that's where my inspiration for magazine theme actually came from. Thus, I wanted to have something about Adele on my magazine cover. Moving on to Pink Floyd who are not at all linked to soul music as they are/were a rock band, however they still have an element of R&B in their music.
I, then, mentioned Rihanna and Drake who are huge R&B stars.
Talking bout my plug, I chose Justin Bieber for that because his previous album, Purpose, mainly focuses on R&B and he has also sung soul songs back in the day e.g. heartbreaker or change me.
The main reason I mentioned him is because my target audience perfectly matches the audience he targets. And what teenager would not ant a discount on JB's concert tickets?
I also talked about One Direction, mainly because of the same reason as Justin Bieber; similar target audience.

PRELIM TASK- Target Audience Feedback

PRELIM TASK- Flat Plan VS. Final Product

Overall, my final product does resemble my flat plan to a great extent. There have been very few changes to my final product in terms of the use of arrows, size of font & photograph. A change in the photograph angle can also be seen; on my flat plan the face is directly facing the front whereas for my final product I used a side angle to represent power over ego.

PRELIM TASK- Final Ideas

This is how my final product looks like. I have made quite a lot of changes to my magazine cover's initial ideas. Initially, I wanted to keep my model's outfit plain black however, I changed my mind and used a red check top. The reason behind this change is the change of my target audience. My initial target audience included almost all age groups but I later changed it to teenagers and young adults. This led me to present my model's character as a complexed one as most teenagers in today's generation fight with their inner voices and they rely on music to make themselves feel better. This can be seen in my model's pull quote.
Furthermore, I changed my magazine's feature colours to blue, white and black. My magazine's theme is a fusion of R&B with soul music. I used blue and white to represent soul music because they are usually seen as representing innocence and purity, which links to soul. Whilst, black represents power and strength, hence R&B.
The reason why I kept "tunes" in red/orange colour is because of the colour theory where blue's complementary colour is red/orange.

Here's my magazine cover before I made major changes to it. After receiving feedback from my peers and teachers, I decided to keep my model's eyes in their original colour because the colour I chose for them (green) did not seem very appealing. Furthermore, I got rid of the arrows which were there to tell my readers about the other stories inside my magazine. In this version of my magazine cover, it can be seen that I used colour red instead of white. The reason why I changed it to white is because of my model's top which is also red and having red font kept on mixing up with the top.

PRELIM TASK- Masthead Font Choice

PRELIM TASK- Photoshop

 I changed the levels of my magazine photograph in order to make my model's face features stand out.

 Due to my model's top being printed, it was hard to see her name clearly, hence I added a box in the background which looks way better than prior to adding the box.

 Furthermore, I thought to change my model's eye colour from hazel brown to something which should come across as a symbol of power.