Question 2:How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Laura Mason

Our ancillary texts to accompany our documentary are a magazine article and a radio trailer. These products are used to sell and advertise our documentary

and make the documentary look appealing to our target audience. We

had to make sure that all three complimented each other and worked

together with our documentary.

Our chosen target audience is teenagers and young adults aged between 13 and 24 as people this age are most likely to participate in illegal downloading. We have focused

on both boys and girls as they would download equally. The audience would be in college or a have a job as downloading would be the quicker option to going out and buying. They’d be frequent users of computers, mobile phones and music devices as

illegal downloading is easily accessible on these devices and this age range would use them all the time. They will also be music fans and like to attend concerts and festivals

to see their favourite acts live; therefore spending money on this rather than cd’s or legal downloads. We have aimed at no specific race as it is a topic that affects

everyone and to tackle this we have shown a range of races in our documentary. Again, we have no specific location target as it is a worldwide issue and the

documentary would be relatable to many people around the world.

For our radio trailer we included background music, voice over and clips from our documentary including vox pops and formal interviews. We used aspects of our documentary in the radio trailer so that the audience knew instantly that the two were

connected and so they combined well together. For the background music we used a funky beat (much like the one in our documentary) to keep the radio trailer within the target

audience and keep the connection with the documentary. We used the same voice for the radio voice over so that it kept the

professionalism and to link it completely with the documentary.

We chose to air the radio trailer on BBC Radio 1 as this is the most current and relevant radio station and would be listened to by a large percentage of our target audience: it is also related to the station that

we would play the documentary on. Radio 1 also has the largest amount of listeners compared to any radio station. It broadcasts to a total

amount of 52,352,000 adults a year and is listen to by 11091000 people each week with each listen tuning in for an average of 6.9 hours a week.

http://www.mediauk.com/radio/309/bbc-radio-1/listening-figures

For our double page spread we used several, appropriate stills from our documentary to include on the double page spread.

We did this so that they linked directly together and so the audience could instantly relate the two. To keep with the

younger target audience we had to choose a younger style listings magazine to show our double page spread in. We did

this so that we could include more images, brighter colours and text and lesser text so that it would appeal to the audience and make them want to read about our documentary. It is for these reasons that we chose TV Choice magazine instead of the more mature Radio Times. We felt that TV Choice had more appeal to

younger audiences and would be the best to sell our documentary.

TV Choice is not perhaps the most popular listings magazine but it does

have a wide fan base. It is read by 1887000 adults a year and dominates 3.7% of the population who read these magazines. This was not why we chose the magazine but because of its use of bright colours and layout. It has many

different types of articles in it, from real life stories to advertising programmes

and therefore reaches to a wider audience because of its breadth of

content. http://www.mediauk.com/magazines/142013/tv-choice/readership-figures

In my opinion I feel that the three do work with each other but it is the double page spread that is of the lowest quality and sells the

documentary the less. The double page spread sells the documentary less as it is not of a high quality and the colours do not fit with the

serious theme of the documentary. We should of spent more time on the double page spread and perhaps chose a more professional magazine to show off our documentary (although the problem with doing this is we would of appealed to the wrong audience). I think the radio trailer sells the documentary really well as the elements used are well connected to the documentary and it directly relates to it and the chosen radio station

is perfect for our target audience.