Promotional Methods

1. Promotional Methods Alex Haslam BTEC ICT Unit 28

2. Video Promotion The term video promotion includes online advertisements that have video with them, but is generally interpreted as the advertisements that appear on TV and internet streams. Broadcasting websites such as Sky and Virgin Media have these on their sites, playing before video clips on their websites. In 2010, video advertisements accounted for 12.8% of all videos viewed online. We all know about video promotion, mainly because we have seen all the advertisements on the TV. Many people prefer to watch videos on the internet rather than read walls of text on webpages. One of the best things about videos is that they have the potential to go viral, which will mean many Google searches to the video and move the webpage containing the video up the ranks in the Google search so more people can reach the webpage with the video on. What people like most about the videos, is that it’s a human, something about seeing the whites of someone’s eyes is really important as it can show sincerity or any emotion or message you want to convey.

3. Why we use Video Promotion The reason we use video advertisements is to attract new customers, due to the advertisements reaching a wide variety of audiences all over the world. There are also numerous benefits to video advertising, such as; presenting a professional image of your company, increasing brand recognition significantly, complements and adds strength to other brands you might want to advertise, grab people’s attention and much more. It also is viable that Video advertising will increase your customer base, sales and profits as people remember 3 times longer than if they simply read the advertisement. Some facts about videos: • Only 20% of browsers on your site will stay and read text, but over 80% will stay to watch a video containing the same content as the text. • A company website is also fifty times more like to be on the front page of a Google search when it contains a video. • Adding video to your sites will also make a browser six times more likely to become a browsing customer. • Customers who view videos on average will stay 2 minutes longer than other customers, and those 2 minutes could be spent buying your product.

4. Video Promotion in Different Industries Video advertising is used in different industries such as entertainment, leisure, education, training, marketing and virtual reality because of how effective it is at spreading awareness of your product: • Entertainment: Usually advertising new television series or game trailers. These are often on the internet. • Leisure: These are usually video packages promoting their holiday destinations and attracting people to them. • Education: Most often promoting the latest documentary. • Training: These take the form of offering apprenticeships to people or for advertising places at a University. • Marketing: Used to advertise new companies and increase investors in the company’s stock as well as numerous products on late night TV. Such as the JML slice and dicer. • Virtual Reality: Video advertising is used in virtual reality to advertise these games and increase their subscriber base. An example of this would be the MMORPG World of Warcraft.

5. Audio Promotion This is where products are advertised over radio or podcasts on the internet. This usually involves an advertisement recorded by your company or written by your company and then read by the broadcaster of the radio, or the host of the podcast. Audio promotion is a far cheaper method than video promotion due to the fact you only have to rent a recording studio for a brief time or simply write a small statement advertising your company for the broadcaster to read. If you decided to do video promotion, you would usually have to spend a long time on making the advert and spend lots of money on recording it to get it ready for television or the internet. The main goal of audio promotion is to start advertising your promotion locally due to the fact that most radio stations are local. This is a good build up to beginning video promotion as it creates awareness of your product, though reaching a smaller audience, it will build up support to the product. The main reason that we would suggest to use audio promotion is to build up the support of the product and then use the profits to move into video promotion to reach a far larger audience.

6. Audio Promotion in Different Industries There are many different uses of audio promotion in a variety of industries, such as: • Entertainment: In entertainment broadcasts such as sporting events the commentators will often read an advertisement given to them by their sponsors. • Leisure: An example of leisure audio promotion would also be in sporting broadcasts such as football, similar to in entertainment. • Education: Revision material such as podcasts and tapes will have sponsors to make money from their product who will have something for the broadcasters to read out. • Training: A common form of audio promotion in the training industry would be for people use audio tapes to help learn new skills or give up smoking, since their brains will be constantly processing the information, they don’t need to pay attention. • Marketing: Most often used on a business’ website. This can feature music tracks to help keep the visitors attention, recording video testimonies from satisfied clients and greet visitors with a video from the CEO of the company. • Virtual Reality: Often virtual reality sites or large multiplayer online games will feature appealing background music to keep the player enticed and using alerts and sounds to help players navigate important interfaces.

7. Why we use Audio Promotion We use Audio Promotion because it has a different way of reaching people than most common forms of Media. Music for example, it can be calming and relaxing or if it’s too fast, we get jittery. This is because music greatly affects our moods, if it’s too slow, it can even bore us. Over time, we learn to associate sounds and music with movies and brands, take the sound of a Windows computer signing off or starting up. It is a universal sound that everyone associates with Windows. The main reason to use Audio Promotion for our product would be to build familiarity with customers and increase the awareness to our product. By constantly making sure the sounds we create mix well with the audience, it can greatly affect the opinions of the company.

8. Still/Moving Images Images can be either two dimensional like a photograph or a screen display, as well as three dimensional like statues and holograms. They can be captured by devices that use optical lenses, like cameras, telescopes and microscopes. An example of this is the Hubble Telescope, as well as observing the clusters of stars in space, it takes images of other solar systems. Images are also often times drawn, painted, sculptured or designed as computer graphics, in the forms of portraits, statues and pie charts etc. There are a few different forms of Images: • A volatile image is an image that is only around for a short time, for example a reflection in a mirror or a puddle. • A fixed image is an image that has been recorded on a material object, such as paper or textiles. • A still image is a single stationary image. This can be any kind of image and is a term that many people in the media business use to say that they are not talking about moving images. • A moving image is typically a film, video or even an animated display in the form of a zoetrope.

9. Still/Moving Images in Different Industries Still or moving images are often used in all kinds of ways in different industries. • Entertainment: All types of images are used in the Entertainment industry. By using still images, promotional methods such as movie posters can be created, promoting the movie. Moving images such as videos are used in the forms of trailers for movies or games or any form of education. • Leisure: Often in brochures for a place of leisure, they use photos they have taken to promote the activities there. Moving images are used usually throughout the trip, with the staff recording the people there and giving them a video of their experiences to take home. • Education: In Art, Geography and History, there are many still images used. For example, in Art, people will take a picture of themselves and then draw the image, or in Geography and History, students will be given an image source and be asked to describe what is going on within the image. • Training: When in training for jobs, some workers attend a presentation, this often contains moving images or still images showing the potential employee what to do. • Marketing: In marketing, often times graphs are used to show the rise or fall of the value of a product. Either fixed copies on paper or computer graphics show the information that is needed. • Virtual Reality: Often times when Virtual Reality sites are created, they will use banners that contain a still image of the site to advertise on other pages. They also make use of moving images to produce videos or animated advertisements for sites.

10. Why we use Still/Moving images The reason we use still or moving images is because it is a fairly cheap method of promoting our product. Still images can be created by any artist that knows how to use Photoshop or any other graphics program and they are also able to be mass produced. Examples of this are the infamous ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters. These posters are known to everyone and an example of how popular a simple image can become. For moving images, anything from an animation to a video clip is often able to go viral on the internet, gaining much popularity amongst the internet community. Still/moving images are also more attractive to look at then a wall of text on a website. Often times with a video or image, people will spend longer looking at it instead of just signing off from the website after seeing a wall of text.

11. Animation Animation is a rapid display of image sequences to create the illusion of the image moving. The most common way of presenting animation is in the form of a video or a motion picture. It can be made by hand drawing images, using computer made images or real objects. There are different ways of creating animations. For example, for hand drawn images, you can create a flipbook. This is done by drawing different stages of an image in a flipbook and then flipping the pages back, a stickman and a basketball are a good example of this. You can also create animation by using computer graphic programs such as Photoshop to create frames in your image and then use the program to make them appear to move.

12. Animation in Different Industries Animation is a fairly effective tool in any industry: • Entertainment: There are many examples of animation in the entertainment industry, most commonly in the form of cartoons. Famous ones such as SpongeBob Squarepants and the Simpsons have been around for many years, still entertaining fans. • Leisure: Animation here is similar to entertainment, often times when people have spare time they will relax and watch some TV. There’s not much use of animation in Tourism besides videos promoting a popular destination spot with a popular character or PowerPoint's with images. • Education: This is often used to convey information to students as students pay more attention when information is presented to them in the form of animated characters or slides in PowerPoint. • Training: In training, the instructors can use computer animation to demonstrate things visually how they want to, because they have exact control over the animation. • Marketing: Often times, companies will place animated banners on websites to advertise their new product, using common animation programs. • Virtual Reality: This is the most common form of video games around, although they are quite often 3D rendered, this is still a form of animation. The most common form of animation is found in the old games, such as Mario.

13. Why use Animation? We use animated characters instead of human actors because you don’t have to pay them, manage them or plan reschedules for missed days of filming. Human actors are also known to have expensive conditions and demands from their employers, this then may lead to the employer having to change their idea to match the conditions of the actor. Whereas animated characters have the benefit of being made up, so you can take full advantage of your imagination and not change your ideas to fit someone else’s conditions. Not only that but backgrounds/reality’s that are nearly impossible to create can be made through animation. As well as the fact that contrary to popular belief, animated advertisements cost less to produce then real adverts.

14. Simulation Simulations is an imitation of a real world operation, though to start if off you will need a model. This model has to represent the characteristics or the behaviour of that object, which is key for a simulation. However, there are issues associated with Simulations, such as gaining the knowledge to create the model or the validity of the operation.

15. Simulation in Different Industries We use Simulation in many different industries to achieve many different things. • Entertainment – This is used for computer generated images to simulate images such as dinosaurs for a film like Jurassic Park or Gollum in Lord of the Rings • Leisure – Theme park rides such as rollercoasters have simulations applied to make sure they run safely and effectively, without these, some rollercoasters would send us of the rails. • Education – For education, simulation is often used to teach students about road safety, or workers about dangers in the workplace. • Training – Simulation is often used in the training of Military and Civilian personnel for a specific purpose, in the forms of technological simulations and real world simulations, for example, Military personnel often go through simulations to train, such as a practise drill. • Marketing – Quite often marketing simulations are used to develop a product that will later be used on the market. • Virtual Reality – There are many forms of simulation in virtual reality, in games such as the popular Plane Simulator that give you control over airline flights.

16. Why use Simulation? Business simulations are used to help the participants learn about the processes, procedures and tools used to create the product. A unique aspect of using Simulations for displaying our product is that it gives off an almost real world experience. Simulations also provide many aspects of realism when coming up with ideas of a product as well as learning from making good decisions about how people will want your product advertised.