When making our music video, website and album cover, we made sure that there was a high level of constant branding and synergy across all platforms, creating an effective campaign. The idea of constant branding and a strong artist identity was key for this project, as we were making a debut music video and debut album, meaning that the artist identity had to come across to the audience as heavy as possible.
Branding, colour schemes and style:
We used a constant colour scheme across all platforms, especially for our websites and social media sites. We kept a black/white/hotpink scheme across every page of our Wix website, and customised our Twitter and Tumblr to keep with the theme. We decided on a black/white/pink scheme as the pink connotes the girliness of our band, but the contrast between the black and white shows our rockier side. We also found that this was the same colour scheme used by The Veronicas, who also kept the same black/white/pink across their website and all their CD covers.
On all of the pages we also added the 'The XYZs' logo, to make sure our branding came across as forcefully as possible, and so that everyone would be able to remember our band. The logo was used on everything that we made: our website, album cover, merchandise, tour posters, Twitter backgrounds...etc. This was also shown through the video, as we also painted the 'The XYZs' logo onto the wall, using pink and black paint.
We decided to make our logo as simple and effective as possible; just the name of the band with a pink brush behind it. We liked the brush at the back because it looked a bit like a lipstick mark - showing our girlier side - but also looked like a paint mark, therefore linking our logo to our debut music video.
During the post-production process, we also decided to colour grade our music video using Adobe After Effects. We had decided on a pink/magenta tint on all the performance shots, to enhance the pink from the 'The XYZs' logo that we had painted behind. This again matches the colour scheme that we had on our website (there wasn't a lot of dark black in the video like the website however, but we brought out the pinks to make it match as much as possible).
We also used curves and ProcAmp in After Effects and Premiere Pro to make the video more contrasted, striking and edgy. This also matches all the photos on our gallery of our website and our album cover. We decided to make all of our photos and shots as contrasted as possible (without making it look too overly edited) to connote that rocky, edgy look we were going for, which was also reflected in the styling.
The clothes that we were wore during the video was also the same outfit that we wore on our front cover of our album, as we did an on-set photoshoot after the performance shoot. At first we didn't want to use these images for the front cover as we thought we wanted something different, so at first we used photos from our second promo shoot. We created a draft front cover with the album name 'Material Command', as shown below:
However, after looking at this cover for a while and getting feedback from teachers, we decided that it didn't go well with the music video and didn't connote the exact right image we had in mind. It did show us as a slightly rocky girlband with the predominance of black and the smashed glass in the background, but we decided it looked more similar to something of The Saturdays than The Veronicas. We thought the styling was a bit too feminine and classy, and we wanted something more rocky with an image showing the girls with their guitar and bass. We also decided to change the name from 'Material Command' to 'Exhibit A' as we thought 'Material Command' was again too girly, with people linking the title to 'Material Girl'. We found that 'Exhibit A' sounded more rocky with the connotations of being rebellious, and the fact that it was 'A' reflects the letters used in our band name 'The XYZs'. The final CD cover we thought matched our campaign a lot better, with the same iconography and motifs as the music video, and styling as the website.
On top of making the ancillary website and album cover, we also decided to make a perfume advert. We made The XYZs brand ambassadors of the new fragrance LOUD by Tommy Hilfiger. We thought that this was a perfect fit: the colour scheme for the advert was black/white/pink, the bottle was the same hot pink we had used for all our products, and the name was called LOUD, connoting music. The fragrance is aimed at teenagers/young adults who are 'loud', free and willing to express themselves, similar to the image of Daisy Lowe used in the advert. We thought that this was a lot like The XYZs and their targeted audience: The XYZs are a teenage pop/glamrock/techno girlband who aren't afraid of speaking out and promoting controversial topics such as feminism and girl power in their videos.
We then decided to incorporate the fragrance into a competition on The XYZs website, where contestants could make videos and then tweet their entries with the hashtags and mentions #XYZLOUD, @TheXYZs and @LOUD_Hilfiger, promoting both brands, making it a mutually advantageous campaign.
We also further developed this idea of being brand ambassadors for Tommy Hilfiger, and subtly promoted the brand in our video with Charley/Xanthe wearing a Tommy Hilfiger pair of dungarees during the narrative sequence.
Working together as a package/interactivity:
As a package, all the products work well together, with the ancillary texts referring to eachother. For example on the album cover there are the links to the websites (The XYZs official website and the Walkout Records website), and on the wix website there is a large image on the album cover, and also a link to the Walkout Recrods website. Plus, we used the same QR code on both the website and album cover, therefore bringing the audience to the same page on there phone, whether they used the album or website. The website acts like a hub with links to everything that we have made; including the album, the music video, the behind the scenes video and the cut version of our song.
The interactivity on the website is high, with the audience allowed to click through the website easily at their own will, watch our videos, listen to the music, sign up, purchase merchandise and enter the competition. As mentioned before, we also created accounts on the social networking sites Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, all of which too are easy to access. This shows that all the websites that we created on the internet also work well as a package, with all of them linking up easily. For example on the official Tumblr, there are links just below the header to both our Facebook and Twitter accounts. All of the accounts also post the same information, for example they all posted the behind the scenes and the final video for audiences to view.
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