Cross Media

Cross media piece

Cue: Disney Pixar in partnership with Positive PR, have launched a new competition to find local heroes ahead of the Incredibles 2 release later this year. Head of the PR team responsible, Paige Bowater, discussed the project with us, telling us that they want to get entire families involved with the brand rather than just children. (Insert clip)

Clip script: Our aim with this project is to encourage all members of the family to get involved with Disney Pixar as a brand. We are going to be sending out forms to schools where children can tell us about their personal heroes. We are expecting these to mainly come back as parents or carers and therefore will give children a platform to show how much they appreciate their loved ones. This campaign will finish with an awards ceremony in London where we are going to crown Mr and Mrs Incredible. This year the competition is based only in the UK however if it is successful, who knows we might make it a worldwide annual event.

Cue: For details visit our website www.heartfm.com/theincredibles2

Clip: https://soundcloud.com/paige-bowater/disney

For cross media I created two pieces. The first brings both of my modules together, by creating a Broadcast Journalism story for a bulletin about my project for Public Relations. The second is a physical copy of the proposed form from Public Relations. I chose to do two different ones as I felt they both had their positives and disadvantages as explained in this evaluation.

From the first session of Public Relations I had my idea for my assignment along with an idea for the cross media piece. My idea was to create a campaign proposal for Disney-Pixar which was a competition to find a local Mr and Mrs Incredible. This contained an element which was a form which would be handed out to schools, for children to tell the company about their hero, hence why one of my cross media pieces is a physical draft of what this form would look like. It is effective in that it provides details about a website created for the competition, whilst also promoting the release of The Incredibles 2, which was the main aim of the campaign. The main target audience for these forms are primary school children, thus the simplistic style and memorable characters. The two characters I chose to use are Mr and Mrs Incredible, this was for two main reasons. The first being that the competition is to find local 'Mr and Mrs Incredible', the second is too subtly suggest to the child that they should talk about their parents or carers. If the imagery was successful, then it would also complete another of the projects aims, which was to make parents/carers feel appreciated and get them involved with Disney-Pixar as a brand. Overall, I believe this piece is successful in what it is supposed to do, get children involved with the campaign by getting them to submit nominations for the competition, however it doesn’t target the other part of audience as parents are not always aware of everything their children do at school.

The script idea came as I was completing my assignment for Broadcast Journalism. I was trying to find a way that I could bring both modules together whilst also targeting the adult portion of my target audience. The aim with targeting adults as well as children is so they can use the social media parts of the campaign and maybe encourage children who haven't done the forms through school to do them through the downloadable file on the website. The style of the script is for Heart FM during the school pick up news bulletin. I chose Heart FM as their website says the target moms aged between 25-55 therefore there is a strong possibility they may have children aged between 5 and 11. I also chose this time as both parent and child will be in the car able to hear it. It is effective in that it outlines the aims of the project, briefly gives a description of it as well as giving a website where more information can be found. The only negative to this piece is that it is unlikely a story like this would be in a bulletin unless it was towards the end in the soft news section. It also is unlikely to be on any BBC channel as it could be classed as an advertisement for The Incredibles 2 and therefore a breach of their guidelines.

Overall, both pieces have their positives and negatives however as far as effectiveness is concerned they are both successful. The form is successful with targeting a younger audience as where the radio script is more beneficial when targeting an adult audience.

During the production days for Broadcast Journalism I struggled. The management role fell on my head as the news reader for week one and although I only officially had this role once it became the same responsibility for all three weeks. In terms of professionalism, week 1 went badly, time management was definitely an issue which meant when it was time to go on air we hadn't properly prepared. However, by week 2 we got better and week 3 flowed well. As a team we came prepared every week with around 12 stories, therefore securing a minimum 6 story bulletin no matter which leads led to dead ends. For week 3 our deadline was 12 o'clock instead of 3 o'clock therefore we knew the time schedule used the previous week would not have worked, in preparation I had already wrote two stories late the previous night, thus ensuring they were still fresh but giving myself less work to do during the production day. This worked successfully and allowed time for us to upload everything into burli and actually creating the only one out of our 4 news bulletins that had no errors. Although this is the case I did not use it in my assignment as I didn't feel as though the content as far as news variation in the topics are concerned was as strong as the previous 2 weeks. To conclude, I believe that the level of professionalism I have shown has been high and continued to grow throughout the 3 weeks. If I could change anything, I think I would have found a way to get our group to work quicker during week 1 however it was a learning curve and without that initial struggle I can't guarantee we would have strived to improve as much as we did.

Production days for Public relations were frustrating. Members of the group continually didn’t participate during the days or at meetings or pull their weight which created a lot of anxiety amongst the group, however when it came down to the final presentation, I believe we were able to pull it together and deliver a polished piece. I was proud of the initial idea, which was my own however I cannot take all the credit as on the first day we developed it as a group. I took the roles of graphics designer, financial expert, as well as explaining the idea and expressing our targets, which although none of these are anything I claim to be brilliant at, I feel as though I portrayed them all well. To conclude, I do not believe our group worked particularly well together, which unfortunately I think could be seen in the presentation slides with certain elements by other members of the group not being as detailed as they should have been, however I do hope that the high energy and professional style of the presentation hid this well. If I could change anything about this project, I think I would have taken on as many roles as I could just to ensure that there was as much detail available to the client as possible.