TV ADVERTISEMENT EVALUATION

The Brief

Our task was to re-market a product from Unilever. Unilever is one of the most successful consumer good companies ranging from foods to home & personal care. I worked with Steve Abbs & Sam Read & we decided to re-brand Marmite. Before we could all decide, we each did a presentation on what product we would like to re-market, who we were going to target & how we were planning on doing it. When we discussed who's we were going to do, they both agreed that my idea sounds good & it could work. As a group we then began discussing the possible developments with my idea. This worked well as everyone added their own ideas to re-brand it. The audience were originally targeting families & mothers that would love to give their children the yeast extracted food paste. We decided to change the target audience to Teenagers (young adults 18-25) as we believed teenagers hadn't found Marmite appealing. 

The Finished Product & Feedback

We collected feedback from two sources. These sources were from the people in our class & on an online survey. I was able to collect feedback for my online questionnaire by posting the link to it on social networking sites.

I shared the survey online to Facebook & Twitter & I am happy with all of the results - even if they were a little critical! I am quite confused with the feedback as some people have said that it's aimed at Teenagers but the majority of people said no when I asked if they thought they were the ideal target audience. I can't be certain how this has happened, but I would rather take sides with question 10 as the majority of the answers said it was for younger audiences - which means Sam, Steve & I were successful to portray this to the audience.

I think the main message was picked up by the audience. Some of our classmates had said that they liked the initial idea of keeping the love/hate relationship with Marmite. I think we managed to address our message to the audience, only not as strong as we wanted it to be. We started off by demographically choosing an age range that we wanted to target, which was teenagers! By putting the survey out on the social media websites - where we are all friends with mostly teenagers - the responses concluded that they had particularly liked & enjoyed the advert, which is exactly what we wanted to hear. I do think we could have made the message just a little clearer as some feedback on the survey had said. I think if we had put a little bit more time into how we were going to address the message to the audience and emphasised it a bit more we could have easily achieved getting a greater and more positive response on our surveys. This is something we have learnt & will improve on our future projects. 

We really thought about everything that was going to be in the scene. For example, Steve when he is holding his crumpet, we had to make sure that stayed in the right hand throughout the entire process so we didn't mess up any continuity. We also really wanted to have this idea of recreating the horror convention. We accomplished this by adding in a darker contrast & putting the setting in a forest. 

I already thought of the advertisement having horror conventions so we decided to set it in the recreational grounds just opposite the college. This helped create the mysterious atmosphere but we needed the editing to fit in with it. As I wasn't here when the footage was first uploaded onto the computer, Sam & Steve had split up 1 sequence of footage to look seemingly quick. You can see the footage at 0:07 seconds on our advert. This was done by cutting up the shot in 6/7 shots. This also helped build up the tension within the advert and keep the audience captivated. There was an issue with the sound when Steve says "I love you" to the Marmite, this is at 0:46. We didn't use a microphone that would block out the ambient noises in the background (wind & cars). We had recorded it along with the visual & just simply tried turning the volume up on Premiere Pro, this loud noise resulted in breaking the atmosphere within the scene. This was mentioned more than once in our classroom feedback session & within the survey. Here are a couple of comments.

With the feedback I received it's a little difficult to decide whether anyone would buy it or not as the majority of feedback said they didn't like Marmite. I immediately regret the decision adding that choice to the survey. But unfortunately the yes/no answers are both the same with 3 answers each. I personally think it wouldnt get teenagers to buy the product due to the little mistakes in the advert and it wouldn't look good on television.

(E) I can't really decide what persuasion techniques we had used because honestly, we didn't really think about it during the pre production stages. We mostly thought about having a strong narrative that the audience could follow & identify with. If I had to choose one, I guess we would have elements from Pathos: An Appeal To Emotion. This was only because we wanted the audience to follow a long the girl's story; why is she running? what is she running from? is she in some sort of danger? etc. At the end of it, we wanted the audience to find the comedy aspect of it as it was just a little jar of Marmite. We kept the idea of the Love/Hate relationship, so everyone who watched the advert could identify with it because not everybody likes Marmite! 

(F) We were trying to keep the Love/Hate campaign that Marmite had already introduced. We also wanted to preach more towards teenagers as Marmite had already addressed to Families, Men, Women & even Children using Paddington Bear. We targeted Teenagers by using teenage actors in a horror/comedy styled advert. I know a lot of my friends who are teenagers likes to watch horror movies, so I assumed the audience could identify with the characters and want to know what could possibly be chasing the girl!

(G) Do I think the advert looks professional? Let's be honest here, no I don't think it looks professional. It's easy to say, yes it's the best advert ever & their is nothing wrong with it. When truth is, their are quite a lot of easy correctable mistakes. During production we had faced many faults such as rainy days making the floor extremely slippery so we had to be careful whilst running with equipment. We had also forgot to add a prop after we had shot our first 6 shots, so we had to reshoot.

Luckily, we did not break any of the BCAP codes during the production. Our advert stays within all of the regulations & the rules of the codes. For example our Ad does not contain anything do with 04 Harm and Offence, which basically sums up to avoid:

• Causing anybody under the age of 18 any mental or physical harm
• Encouraging the audience to take part in anything that could danger them
• Adding any visual effects in that could effect the audience who have photosensitive epilepsy.  

Any many more rules. Although we added some visual effects in our project, we ensured nothing will be added that could potentially harm any of our viewers. We also had to check with our tutors about the sequence that took part 0:07 in because of the slight flashing as the video came back. We were told it would be fine. 

Personal Reflection

I am so proud with the outcome of the final advert. Obviously I had bigger outcomes as I imagined it to be shot with the most professional equipment but with what we had, we did so well! It was almost exactly how we pictured it from the beginning - excluding the couple of days we had to improvise due to the location. Our storyboards are almost identical to the footage & we remained on top of our schedule. If you look to the right, you will see a picture of all of our storyboards that were used in the pre production stage, if you can see them clearly you can compare them to the project! We never once feel behind shooting as we knew that I wouldn't be here for a couple of lessons, so we knew what we had to do in the time limited. We used our time very efficiently & worked together as a team to make sure everything would be done on time, which I think was our strongest element as a group. There are a few things we could improve on that we spotted & what our audience had picked up on. Some of this feedback included:

•  The setting where Steve is, as it looks like he's not near a Forest (where I was)
• There was a problem with the sound when Steve said "I love you" as we hadn't used a proper microphone, so we caught some wind & cars.
• The effect we had making it darker (Three Way Colour Corrector) messed up a bit at the end, which could have been sorted if we had a little more time. It had a problem with the slogan & kept making the picture of the Marmite transparent. 

But with every comment for improvement there was feedback on what we had successfully accomplished. I agree, one of the main weaknesses that was obvious on the advert was the sounding with Steve. I would have killed if we had more time to redo that.

Was I satisfied with the final outcome? Very! I'm proud of the different shot variations we incorporated, the effect on how it looked to add to the horror convention, the way we portrayed the Marmite & how much we did in the time we gave ourselves. I especially loved the narrative with this advert, the girl being chased by something that was made out to be slightly horrifying, but then it was kind of comical as it was just a little pot of Marmite! There was a lot of different things that we could have improved on, including everything above. 

We were all able to have an equal amount of input in the group as there was three of us altogether. I believe we all had our strongest points where the input would be stronger & other places would be a little weaker. For example, I was involved more during the production because I think more practically with ideas when I'm standing on location & visually imagining it, however, I took a step back when it came to editing the project because I knew I wasn't so confident & that's where Steve really showed off his potential. We all did some editing when it came to it, each of us having our own input into what we could do to make it more visually interesting, or what music would be added in where etc. If we could do it again, I think we would nominate someone to be more of a leader role as we were all pretty laid back & happy working as a team so the organisation lacked just a little bit. But overall we were the unstoppable S TEAM STUDIOS & we worked so well, I'm so proud!! (Secretly, I want to work with them all the time).