Brief
Broadway Books Publishing house is starting a new way of advertising it's published books. Adverts will be made and broadcasted on diverse television stations. The main aim for this campaign is to promote their books. As another part of the campaign they are organizing a fictional world wide competition for the best 1 minute advert. This competition is open for young creative media students. The competitors are to produce a fun and entertaining advert for a non narrative book published by Broadway Books themselves.
The rules are : The advert must be 60 seconds in length
Must be about a non-fiction book of your choice
Must fall under the 'G' rating criteria as regards to regulation
It must be short, fun and entertaining
Client

Broadway Books, from the parent company Random House, are a production house founded in 1996 and situated in the United States. Random House Inc. is the largest English- Language general trade book publisher.
Broadway books publish books that come from different categories like: Narrative Non-Fiction, Memoirs, Health and Fitness, Inspiration, History, Travel, Pop Culture, Politics, Finance, Humour and Contemporary Fiction. They are mostly known for Memoirs, like 'Elizabeth Edwards' Memoir ' and ' Bill O'reiley's Memoir' . Other famous publications are 'A bold Fresh Piece of Humanity' , 'Liberal Fascism' and ' A Lion called Christian'.
They publish approximately 70 titles every year, a good percentage of those become New York Bestsellers.
http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/broadway-books/
Author
Barney Hoskyns is an English Music Critic. He is also the editor of an online music journal Rock's Backpages. Hoskyns is an Oxford Graduate in English. His first experiences began when he started witing for Melody Maker and New Musical Express. He wrote articles about music in general and some reviews about bands of that era. After some time he quit his job to start writing a book about soul music. The result was the book 'Say It One Time For The Brokenhearted: Country Soul In The American South' .
After this publication (1987) he became well known in the 'music business'. Since then he has written for varius famous music magazines and worked as a contributing editor for The Times, The Guardian, The Inependent and Arena Magazine. He also contributed to the magazine Rolling Stone for some time.
During the 1990's he worked as Associate Editor and later on US editor of Mojo Magazine , one of the biggest music magazines in the whole world.
In these past few years he has devoted his time to writing Biographies and Memoirs of some of the legends in music history. Some of his most famous publications are : ' Waiting for the Sun: A Rock and Roll History of Los Angeles' , ' Across the Great Divide The band and America' , ' Low Side of the Road : A Life of Tom Waits' , ' Into the Void : Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath' and the list goes on.
In 2000 he became senior editor of CDNOW in London.
Budget
Since I am a student, I will be working on a very tight budget, or no budget at all. Obviously I will not know how much this production will cost un till the story board is finished. Because of this I have to see how I can create this advert with spending as little as possible.
Deadline
In order for me to finish this advert on time, I have a number of deadlines that will keep me working throughout this period of time un till the final closing date. This is the plan for the first 4 weeks
WEEK | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 |
What To Do | Research + Generate Ideas | Finish Pre-Production Paper work | Finalize Story Board and Script + Book Apparatus from school | Start Filming |
Technical Resources
The equipment I will be using is owned by the school. The school currently has 4 HD cameras and 2 Tripods. For the idea that I have till now, for my advert , these will be ideal. Apart from this, we are provided with computers that are installed with editing programs, obviously these will be needed during the post production stage.
Technical Constraints
Although the school is very well equipped with filming and editing apparatus, there are still some things that we do not have access to. One of the things that I wish I had access to is a dolly track. I think this would make the advert I am planning more entertaining to watch , since it would create more dimension in my shots.
While researching similar equipment, I found methods to create your own dolly track, but I wouldn’t feel safe with a home made dolly cart and an expensive HD camera that isn’t mine.
Target Audience
To help me identify my target audience I started out by conducting a questionnaire. The questions were :
- Do you enjoy reading Biographies?
- Do you only read Biographies about people you know ?
- Do you prefer detailed Biographies ?
- Do you prefer Autobiographies as opposed to Biographies?
- Would an entertaining Ad encourage you to read a Biography about someone you have never heard about ?
I asked these questions because the book that I have chosen is a biography about an artist (Tom Waits) that is not very well known to the mainstream audience. I gave questionnaire to 15 people, their ages varied between 17 and 56. After looking at the results I found out that middle aged people enjoy reading detailed biographies, and do not mind reading biographies about artists that they have never heard about.For the question about advertisements, the younger people seem to be more influenced by entertaining adverts.
From my findings, I think that my target audience is :
- Music Oriented
- Aged between 15-50’s
- English Speaking
- Interested in the 60’s and 70’s lifestyle
Regulation

Since the advert has to fall under the G rating, this means it has to be suitable for all ages, I have to be careful about the content of the advert. There are various things that cannot go into the advert, for example things like drugs, violence, nudity harsh language and racism. Associations like the ASA and Malta Broadcasting Authority provide guidlines for producers in order for them to produce material that is suitable to be shown at all times for all ages.
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