Evaluation - 2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

The main product I produced was a local newspaper; alongside my main product I also created a poster and a radio advert for the same newspaper brand.

The combination of my main product and my two ancillary products was decided on what I would learn from creating them. I could have chosen to design and make a website for the newspaper instead of doing one of the ancillary tasks I had already chosen (poster and radio advert). The reason for not choosing to create a website was that I have already been doing that in one of my other courses, ICT. It may have been easier for me to create a website rather than a radio advert but it wasn’t anything new or interesting to me. I had already gained the skills to create a website, but, recording and editing a radio advert was completely new to me.

The skills I have learnt using the different software to create my ancillary tasks are far greater than before. Especially whilst creating my radio advert, I was using a piece of software on the Apple Macs called Garage Band to record and edit my advert. I had never used this software before but I learnt a lot from it over the time I used it. The different things I learned included, finding, adding and editing different sound tracks and effects. The sound effects I used had to seem conventional to radio adverts in general, not just specific local newspaper radio adverts, which were kind of tacky in a way, to make the advert stand out more. Also the tone of voice and language I used had to be conventional. From my research the voices and language used also seemed quite tacky/comic. This is why I decided to use a cheesy West Country accent to represent the area in which my newspaper was being advertised in.

My radio advert was advertising the ‘Holidays’ section in my newspaper, saying that you can find cheap holidays. This would want people to purchase my newspaper to read about these cheap holidays. The holiday’s section is only published every Thursday so the section is dedicated to its own issue. This is so the paper wouldn’t run out of bargain holidays to display; they can show great deals each week, it’ll give a buyer a reason to purchase this newspaper on that day.

My poster was about a free supplement that comes with the newspaper every Monday. The supplement is called ‘Climbing the Property Ladder’. It is a booklet on different houses in the local area for sale. This would apply to a large audience, especially the young first time house buyers who need to gather research.
I also learned many skills whilst producing my poster. One of the skills I was already excelling at was using Photo Shop. To manipulate the picture on the poster in the way I did took quite a bit of research, and I had to use some tutorials but now I would know how to do it again. Also the research I carried out on existing newspaper posters gave me the idea of the layout as it was quite conventional on many posters. I included the website address to the poster as well, to try and gain more publicity to my brand and give it a wider range of media types.