The Creation of Magazine Advert

A magazine advert is a document designed to be placed in a magazine to advertise their tour, a new album or a relaunch. For our magazine advert we chose to do an advert publicising a new tour which The Toy Hearts would be performing. The magazine advert should be carefully designed to promote the band in a good light to sell the brand. An audience will look at an image and will initially have a denotation, this is what can be said about an advert, and for example, it is a green background with numbers and letters. A connotation is what an audience may deduce from and audience or what they may read, for example, an audience may read this background as sci-fi and very technical. These connotations can vary dramatically from person to person depending on their JICTAR class and their socioeconomic background.

Our magazine advert was designed to do two things, sell the brand image. This means that the advert must make the band and their music seem appealing. The second is to sell tickets to the gigs, which will ultimately earn money. This is a huge part of the music industry due to illegal downloading and the fading CD industry, bands now make most of their money doing tours or gigs which are also very costly to put on. This means they must very carefully market their gigs or tours to ensure as many tickets as possible are sold as possible to ensure the tour is profitable and the band can make more music.

On our magazine advert we used many of the same elements as the Digipak cover to ensure a sense of synergy across the whole of the Toy Hearts brand. This is to try and increase brand recognition so the band’s literature is instantly recognisable by a large audience. These synergistic elements were both the brown paper background and the stickers and pin up girl design. We also placed some different elements on the magazine advert to provide the audience with some jouissance in Barthes terms. Jouissance in Barthes’ terms means pleasure through the unexpected. We included all the dates for the band’s tour to ensure the interested audience could purchase tickets. The font of the band reflects the band’s essence which is eccentricity and playfulness. We also put “sold out” images over some of the dates to make it look more realistic, and to imitate the conventions of other magazine adverts.