Advertising to Men and Women

Personification in advertising
http://search.ebscohost.com.libproxy.abertay.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsh&AN=59258484&site=ehost-live

Advertisers men are not idiots
http://web.ebscohost.com.libproxy.abertay.ac.uk/ehost/delivery?sid=b54629b6-371e-4b1c-8be8-d180d6adc6dc%40sessionmgr11&vid=3&hid=11

Modern rules of advertising
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4204412.stm


MALE ADS:

FEMALE ADS:

Pitch Week Meeting

During the pitch week session I talked with Kenny McAlpine about the progress of my project idea, we discussed the research I'd done and how to take the project further.  The main focus was how to look at the budget side of creating music.  We agreed that it would come down to equipment and software choice and man hours, man hours being the major factor in cost.  We talked about different business models for a music composer  and which would be the cheapest and which would produce the best quality audio.

It became obvious by our the way our discussions were going that a large portion of the project would be business orientated and that the creative outcome would not necessarily need to be very creative in order to answer the project question.

We argeed that since being creative is where my skills lie this project idea wasn't quite right for me.  It was clear that I wanted my creative sound production to be just that, creative and that I was still interested in music for advertising so we talked about how music is used to sell different products.

When discussing jingles we talked about how they protray a company's image and whether there is a theory behind that. This is potentially a route I would like to look into.

We also discussed the difference in music when advertisers are trying market a product to a particular niche group.  This also interested me about whether or not advert music could be so influencial. Kenny suggested starting with the difference between men and woman as there should be alot of research material available for that area. Since advertising is not his strong point he suggested that I get in touch with business lecturer Jason Turner to get some more advise, I shall try to arrange a meeting asap.

Project Title Idea #2

"To review how music/jingles are currently used in local low budget advertising. Establish the best audio quality that can be produced for an advert within varying budgets inorder to produce higher quality adverts overall."

The STV advertising costs website was down so I couldn't find out the average cost of air time in the local region.

This ad for the Aberdeen Snowsports Centre is not the worst visually but the choice of music track in my opinion is not fitting at all!

This ad is for the Evening Express News paper, it's not bad at all but may have something to do with the good graphics although the sound is good too.

Meeting With Kenny McAlpine 9th Oct

Arranged a session with Kenny to discuss my project idea:

"To review how music/jingles are currently used in advertising and evaluate their effectiveness on consumer/viewers in order to produce a basic guide/model for advertisers/musicians to follow when creating an advert."

 We talked about how I would go about researching this area then focused mainly on how to measure "success" whether it be financial or popularity or award winning. Alone these measures cannot soley be as a result of "Music" so a correlation of these types of measure would have to be assesed and then analysed to create a critical framework in which the end product would also be assessed on.

The main concern or suggestion Kenny had was about why this would be a good project, more specifically why was there a need to create a "music guide" in the first place.  I stated that the project idea came about by my dislike of local TV advertising and how it can be made better. I reckoned that by divising a model or formula that would be based on techniques/methods used in successful adverts, smaller businesses could follow this guide and in theory produce similarly good outcomes.  Kenny stated that if indeed you could create such a guide ( he also quiried whether creating successful music was down to a strict formula or was infact something more..) would there then be a flux of small businesses jumping on the band wagon of this easy guide to success and as a result the factors that incially made the guide successful would then become diluted and common and would lose their impact.

Kenny then asked me, why I thought local adverts were so bad, and that did it not infact come down to budget more than anything else.

We then discussed basing the project on producing the best sound within a small budget. This seemed like a very plausable idea and one that I was happy with as it still involved me creating music.

Project Title Idea #1

"To review how music/jingles are currently used in advertising and evaluate their effectiveness on consumer/viewers in order to produce a basic guide/model for advertisers/musicians to follow when creating an advert.  Then create a piece of music for an advert strictly following the guide and evaluate whether is is sucessful."

WHY? Lack of musical knowledge in local advertising. Rubbish local adverts! STV. To hone personal composition skills towards advertising.

HOW? Analyse adverts from various genres or perhaps a couple of specific? TV program advertising? Guide: Almost flow chart like? Using examples of existing adverts. Create music for an advert following the guide strictly

Inspriration

The main thing that inspires me is music. Creating, listening, analysing....all aspects really. It would therefore make sense for me to do a project based around producing a piece of music.

Narrowing it down

Robin Sloan said something in his lecture yesterday that made narrowing down my project ideas simple.  Basically he said something along the lines of "Your project should boost your skills in your chosen field as well as create a portfolio in the field in which you would potentially seek a career in".

So as much as reproducing the human voice would be interesting, it pulls me down a path of expertise which I know very litttle about.

Looking back to why I'm in this course and what I'm good at it comes down to creating music (rather than just sound) therefore I think music in advertisement would be more relevent to my skills and also an area in which I would prefer to work in after graduating.

The Human Voice

As a singer I've always been interested in the human voice and how it can be "trained".  I had a friend who studied music performance and was taught about how the voice worked, i.e. which parts of the larynx were used to produce which sounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_voice

The spectrogram of the human voice reveals its rich harmonic content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram A piece of equipement that would be useful.

I would be keen to either emulate the human voice or create the "most satsifying" voice to human ears.

Articulatory synthesis
Articulatory synthesis refers to computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of the human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there. The first articulatory synthesizer regularly used for laboratory experiments was developed at Haskins Laboratories in the mid-1970s by Philip Rubin, Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. This synthesizer, known as ASY, was based on vocal tract models developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, and colleagues.
Until recently, articulatory synthesis models have not been incorporated into commercial speech synthesis systems. A notable exception is the NeXT-based system originally developed and marketed by Trillium Sound Research, a spin-off company of the University of Calgary, where much of the original research was conducted. Following the demise of the various incarnations of NeXT (started by Steve Jobs in the late 1980s and merged with Apple Computer in 1997), the Trillium software was published under the GNU General Public License, with work continuing as gnuspeech. The system, first marketed in 1994, provides full articulatory-based text-to-speech conversion using a waveguide or transmission-line analog of the human oral and nasal tracts controlled by Carré's "distinctive region model".
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_synthesizer


http://www.haskins.yale.edu/facilities/asy.html