Cross Media Advertising

Using many different types of media to advertise one product in different formats is called 'Cross Media Advertising'.

Some of the formats this regularly involves are; Television advertisements and sponsorship sequences, printed posters/billboards, magazine and newspaper articles, direct mail, the internet and the radio. A specific target audience is reached depending on the product, using a combination of these formats.

Cross media advertising is used particularly well when advertising feature films. Distributors give their product a saturated release using many or all forms of media so that people cannot escape the hype of their films. For example the recent release of 'Avatar' (directed by James Cameron, Produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox) was accompanied by;
- Trailers in television ad-breaks
- Videos banners and interactive content all over the internet
- Photo's and articles in/on newspapers and magazines, (even appearing on the cover of 'Empire Magazine', and several different "avatar edition" covers were made for the December 16th edition of 'LIFE' magazine featuring different members of the cast.

The same can be said for the even more recent release of 'Avatar' on DVD and Blu-ray.

Aside from feature films, companies such as 'The Carphone Warehouse' are prominent in using cross media advertising. They advertise through television and radio at the same time in order to maximise coverage. They boast monumental sponsorship deals with hugely popular TV shows. For example a past deal (reportedly worth £3 million a year) with Channel 4 to sponsor reality show 'Big Brother'. The Carphone Warehouse unsurprisingly axed this deal in 2007 after 3 years when the Big Brother franchise was infamously catapulted to global limelight by the seemingly racist (but undeniably moronic) actions of "Celebrities" Jade Goody and Jo O'Meara towards Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty.

"We have concluded that the huge publicity around the show and our involvement within that means it is now time to look for an alternative."

The Carphone Warehouse have now moved on to even bigger things, in the form of a sponsorship deal with ITV's 'The X Factor'.

Being a retail outlet themselves Carphone Warehouse are able to advertise their services and products in print media, cataloging what they have to offer in their own booklets, leaflets and flyers where companies advertising a specific product (most confectioners for example) would be less successful.

Also, acknowledging that not everyone watches a lot of TV and might instead be glued to a laptop/computer on the internet, Carphone Warehouse have deals with some of the most visited websites in the world, for example social networking sites Myspace and Facebook, allowing them to publish mini-ads at the side of home-pages.

Group Production Schedule

22nd January – Continue with individual and group research.

29th January – Finish individual and group research.

5th February – Begin writing treatment and outline initial ideas.

12th February – Begin writing all scripts storyboards and shot lists.

19th February – Finished first drafts of scripts storyboards, shot lists and started location recce and costume planning.

26nd February – Finalise all planning work.

5th March – Begin filming main task.

12th March – Continue filming main task.

19th March – Finalise main task.

26th March – Begin recording and filming Ancillary texts.

2nd April – Continue recording and filming Ancillary texts.

9th April – Finalise Ancillary texts and begin evaluation.

16th April – Continue evaluation.

23rd April – Continue evaluation.

30th April – Finish evaluation and hand in complete project.

Research and Planning Checklist

 Primary and secondary research into similar products
 Research into target audiences for existing texts and for your own product
 Research into new media being used
 Research into cross-media advertising

Design Brief - Advertising

Having established our own independant production company, we were given the choice of five different briefs.

The Brief i have chosen is 'Brief Five', an advertising package for a new product or service which should include two television adverts (as the main text), and TV programme sponsorship sequence and a radio advert (as ancillary texts).

Cadbury Dairy Milk Adverts

Cadbury Dairy Milk is the flagship confectionery brand for Cadbury Schweppes. Chocolate bar leader in the UK, it was worth more than £360 million in 2006 and was purchased by 65% of the population before the 'healthy eating' trend and the raising of prices of raw materials began having an impact on the confectionery market. In this time Cadbury also went through a salmonella scare leading to a huge product recall which i do not need to highlight could not have been good for business.
In 2007 Cadbury genuinely needed something that would renew their growth, the outcome was this advert...



"Rarely is one TV ad so utterly absurd and effective that it touches a nation, reshapes a brand and leaves advertising purists scrambling for the rulebook. But that’s the beauty of this beast."

It is almost universally impossible to imagine or understand how Cadbury could draw any comparisons between an avid gorilla playing a famous drum solo and a bar of Dairy Milk, even harder to comprehend why and how on earth the idea entered somebody's head in the first place.
There is no connection! Why would there be?
But this is exactly why the advert became such a huge hit.
The song, Phill Collins' 'In The Air Tonight' is key to the point and success of the advert.
Cadbury wanted to recreate an emotional relationship with key customers, to tap into the emotional reward consumers are supposed to get with a piece of Cadbury Dairy Milk. "I can feel it coming in the air tonight... and I've been waiting for this moment for all my life" helps highlight that consumers should look forward to this chocolate and it should be the emotional highlight of their day.

With this new objective Cadbury changed their slogan "a glass and half full" to "a glass and a half full....of joy"

"Created by the award-winning Fallon agency in London, the commercial has stimulated great interest, partly because it does not feature the product until the very end".

Rebecca Smithers, consumer affairs correspondent The Guardian, Tuesday 11 December 2007

The only thing interpreted as a link to 'Cadbury' included in this advert before its end is the purple screen behind the Gorilla; the same unmistakeable shade of purple that dominates the wrapper of 'Dairy Milk' and features strongly on many other Cadbury products, the colour that immediately springs to mind if asked to associate a colour with Cadbury.

The actual product is not seen until the final pack shot in the dying seconds, far from 'hard-selling', the advert is a 90 second interpretation of a pure feeling: joy.

As with the first advert the only direct association 'eyebrows' has with cadbury is through colour; the girls dress and hair clip are the same unmistakeble purple mentioned above.

I think these adverts prove that content is important, offering an entertaining pitch instead of a hard selling one has worked wonders for the product. These ad's entertain to catch attention, involve to add complicity, have a subtle branding strategy, and importantly, a message. That to me sounds like a recipe for success.

Another thing helping these adverts to stand out is their length; 3 times as long as a normal ad. Because of the success of the longer Cadbury adverts, all surpassing the minute mark, two of them into the realms of 1:30, we may decide to create a slightly longer advert ourselves.