Success Stories
Learning Outcome 1 (U24): Understand the products that are produced within and across media industries
D1 (U24): Discuss how successful media concepts have been positively exploited across several media industries
To have a successful cross-media campaign, it needs to be planned out carefully and every angle should be covered, alongside this, the campaign needs to have set a goal that will make it easier for the company to plan out the cross-media campaign. The goals that companies might set themselves could be to promote the media product and the business itself as well as to improve on their revenue. Reaching out to a certain amount of people to see what their thoughts of the social media product are is also another good way to have a successful campaign, as it will give the company insight into how the target audience and the public will react to the media product.
Google's assistant 'Home Alone Again' advert:
Social Media:
Social media is considered as the platform to go to when advertising a campaign as everyone has some form of social media, whether that is Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. The public is able to see the campaign that the company has created whilst they are on the go or when they are out and about. Google has 22.8m followers on Twitter and 12.3m followers on Instagram, meaning that they have a global audience and want to reach out to other parts of the world, where people might not have seen what Google is able to create.
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Google advertised the campaign when a picture was released on their Instagram page on the 19th of December. In the picture, you can see Macaulay Culkin in one of the bathrooms in his house, talking to the google assistant. Yet, Google wasn't the only one to promote the advert on Twitter as a company called 'Ad Age' decided to tweet a brief description of the advert and attach a hyperlink, which would take the audience member to a separate page where it contained a more in-depth summary about the Google assistant and itself. Additionally, a photo was attached, where Macaulay Culkin was sitting at the table about to talk to the Google assistant. The company that tweeted about the media product, 'Ad Age', is a marketing and media company that influences the audience to buy media products that are going to be released.
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With Google using Social media as a way of advertising for the Google assistant campaign, the public is able to get involved as they are able to put the advert on their Instagram stories as well as retweeting the advert so that their friends and family can see the advert. The more people that advertise the product the more it will be recognized by the world, which could lead to Google selling more and more Google assistants, whereby the company will reach one of its goals and get its revenue up as well. The campaign was trending on social media thanks to the hashtag that google used, which was '#HeyGoogle". The hashtag was put at the end of each post so that the media product could go viral and the company could get the reputation it needs.
TV Advert:
With millions of people having at least one TV in their house, Google's assistant 'Home Alone Again' advert reached up to 70.7 million views as of the 1st January 2019. Companies like to release their advert on the TV because they want to use the Hypodermic needle theory, where a message will be inserted into the audience and the message will stick with them for some time and with some of the audience going out to buy the product itself. The TV advert itself was a success on its own as 70.7 million viewers watching the advert, with 52 million people going on to buy the media product.
When watching the advert, it was apparent to me that the character in the advert was persuading the audience on how good the google assistant will be and the things you can ask it, which helps with selling the media product. Additionally, the use of synergy was used to help the company advertise the google assistant even more. Google teamed up with the actor who played Kevin McAllister in Home Alone, Macaulay Culkin. The reason for this is because the scene that was used in the google assistant advert is a famous scene being recreated from the Home Alone film, thus Google wanted to show the advancement of technology over the years as well.
Posters/billboards:
Google also produced posters that could be posted to people's homes and could be stuck up around cities, whereby people would see the posters on walls shop windows, train stations, and bus stops. Creating a poster means that Google wanted to attract the public and get straight to the point of the Google assistant, hoping to persuade the public to buy one. Additionally, posters are easy on the eye, therefore, the information that Google presented on the poster about the media product was easier to process for the public and would stay in their minds for quite some time which would have led to some of the public actually going onto buying a Google assistant.
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In response to the posters, the company was able to use large billboards that were placed where a mass number of people would be able to see them. Just like social media, the public was able to see the media product being advertised whilst they were mobile and moving around as the company wanted to get the audience to notice the advert wherever they went. Billboards are more popular in other countries compared to the Uk, for example, America where they have around 425,000 billboards placed around the country. Leading onto this the Google headquarters is situated in America so anything that Google produces will be advertised heavily with posters and billboards.
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As technology is developing heavily, the use of a traditional print-based billboard is slowly declining as digital interactive billboards are coming in to replace them. The way a digital interactive billboard works is that it scrolls through several adverts, where it reaches out to the moving audience such as cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers. However you can get some digital interactive billboards, that plays the part of a clip of the advert, specifically when the media product is being shown. The interactive billboard might have a website of where you can by the Google assistant and social media links which can be another form of accessing their website as Google would have most likely had a hyperlink to purchasing the media product.
Line of Duty 'Lies Cost Lives' Series 6 Campaign:
TV Advert:
The Crime drama-based series, Line of Duty is back on the audiences' TV for a sixth series, with the first series being aired back in 2012. BBC released the trailer on March 9th, 2021, to get the audience prepared ahead of the new series, with over 300,000 views and 4.6K likes. However, the creator of Line of Duty, Jed Mercurio, wanted to get the audience heavily involved and this was done by a scannable QR that was found on the magazine within the trailer. Bearing in mind the TV series is all about the police, capturing bent coppers and investigating crime scenes, Jed likes to squeeze in little hints such as the QR code. For an audience member to spot that QR code and go ahead and investigate what Line of Duty was throwing at the audience, they had to be a Succeeder and Explorer according to the 'Young and Rubicam's Audience Theory'. Yet Jed Mercurio didn't want to stop the advertising of the new series there, once the QR was scanned it took you to a separate page which contained a letter from a Chief constable and on this letter, the word 'next' has been highlighted in bold meaning that there is some form of relevance to the word.
Once clicked 'next' it then takes the audience member to a prescription prescribed to Mr. Steve Arnott, where there is some morse code placed near the bottom of the prescription. With the audience getting this far, the creators of Line of Duty expect them to know that if they crack the morse code, it will reveal a website that the audience has to go to. The website in question is 'bit.ly/3BDVXFS where it will take you to an unlisted youtube video that was released on March 8th, 2021 with over 11,000 views. In the video, there is a math equation in the new belt which is seen as (Hx6)+?.xyz, where the equation will be used when the audience clicks on the hyperlink that can be found attached in the description of the youtube link. The Hyperlink takes you to the fourth avenue on Green Lane in Birmingham, with the equation the audience should be able to figure out that they have to replace the '?' with the number four to get the whole equation of (Hx6)+4.xyz.
Jed Mercurio was hoping that audience members were able to understand that the equation had to be converted into another URL link, this time it being hhhhhh4.xyz. The reason the URL is like this is that in the equation it says Hx6, so there need to be 6 'h's' in the URL with the number 4 by it because you need to add 4 onto the 6'h's', finally '.xyz stays the exact same and would have been put at the end of the URL. Once the URL is typed into the search bar viewers of Line of Duty will be taken to a page where there is a video of someone holding a phone and deleting messages from the lock screen. When zoomed in, you are able to see a fourth web link, with a double underscore, however, the messages below that are hints on how to find the missing context of the URL. The hints tell the audience to add all the numbers at the top of the phone, which totals to 66. Here the audience fill in he double underscore with the number 66 to get 'bit.ly/ph66hzb'. Once the URL was put into the search bar the audience were taken to a website called vimeo.com with a 40 second clip that could be played.
The video is played on a loop but as it progresses there are some intentional glitches that happen. The major glitch which can be seen at the end gives this audience the start of a URL which is 'bbc.in/' with the remainder of the URL being shown on a pink post-it note as '3uZ7Ldt'. Knowing that the audience has got this far, they should be able to figure out if they put the separate parts of the URL together then it would take them to a new website. Having put the URL into Google, it will take you to an unlisted program on the BBC called 6004L9O8D. In the first 50 seconds of the 2 minutes 50-second clip, someone is calling the viewer and telling them that they have 'cracked it' and saying how good of an AC-12 officer you would be if they were to join the force. However, the last two minutes of the program show part of a scene to get the viewers ready and excited ahead of the new season. Jed wanted to get the viewers involved and he successfully did this by using gorilla marketing whereby the creators of Line of Duty wanted to advertise the launch of the new series in an unorthodox, low-budget manner with the public. Additionally, the use of joint venture was applied because both sides of the party (BBC and Line of Duty) wanted to bring all their resources together to make this idea of using a scannable QR code to get the audience interactive with the TV trailer.
Social Media:
​Line of Duty is known for posting a lot of content on their social media channels especially when it comes to the pre-releasing of series. Yet the social media managers for Line of Duty wanted to go all out and wanted to keep the target audience on their toes as much as possible. Especially with COVID-19 having an impact, the team wanted to show everyone what it was like working under COVID-19 conditions. this led to the audience seeing images of scenes being scene. A couple of weeks before the new series being air, social media managers decided to release 10-second clips to get them to let the audience know what is expected to come, without giving anything major away.
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The main reason why Line of Duty likes to use social media as a way of advertising is that their fan base is huge. Their Twitter account has 186.2k followers and 94.6K followers on Instagram. Here, people who follow the Line of Duty socials could retweet the series trailer so their friends and family can see it. Furthermore, Line of Duty was trending on Twitter with the help of the hashtag '#LineofDuty' which led to gaining more and more viewers. Instagram would let you share the Instagram post on the viewers' story, where people can have a look at that person's story and view the series trailer for themselves.
Actors who play their characters within the series decided to show pictures and the trailer so their followers could see what was to come from the actors and the TV series itself. However, the creator of Line of Duty talked about it the most, due to the fact that he had all the information. Jed gave a bit more detail than anyone else, which made the target audience more excited than they originally were. Line of Duty wants to interact with the fans and do this by sharing a sneak peek of what is to come of the new series through images and videos.
