Treatment

Print Advertising Treatment/Proposal

Product name: Shortcut

Client: The Northern Echo

Date: 19.11.2013                                                         Project completion date:

Branding Objectives

What is the genre of your magazine? What are you informing your audience about? How will it branded? What are the connotations of your branding decisions? What are the connotations of the magazine’s name?

The chosen genre of my magazine is Technology. This will be aimed at students aged between 16-24. Particularly male students who have a keen interest in technologies and the internet. I will have to make sure I make the front cover incredibly visually appealing because the geeky demographic are more likely read articles online than on paper. Also because of this I need to make sure that the articles I choose to discuss are topics that my audience would be interested in. The 3 articles I am going to create are; 7 Unusual Ways to Make Money, Is Piracy Bad and How to get Big on YouTube. Hopefully my audience will find these ‘how to’ articles useful and give them and incentive to read the magazine. The magazine will be branded with lots of modern, futuristic colours like whites and blues. I will also not use colour gradients and instead have only solid colours, similar to the style of iOS7 because I think this will make the magazine look fresh and many of my potential readers are likely to own an apple product and therefore will identify with this. My magazine will be called ‘Shortcut’, the connotation behind this is shortcut is a computer term, that means doing a task slightly quicker or more efficiently. Therefore, this magazine is like a shortcut to life that will give you advice and help you to succeed.

Audience communication objectives
Who is your audience? Identify: tribe, socioeconomics, age, gender split.	My audience is 16-24 year olds. The gender split I am aiming for is 80% male, 20% female. The tribe that Shortcut is targeted at is Geek. In future issues I intend to include gadget reviews and the getting big on YouTube article requires you to have a decent camera or editing software. Because of this the socioeconomic group that the magazine is aimed at is ABC1, so that they’re able to afford the gadgets I am referring to. However, because of their age the vast majority of readers will still be living at home, this means that most readers will still want more money so they are able to afford things like cars, car insurance and university savings. This will affect the content of my articles because many of them will be money related as that is something my audience will find appealing. I will also relate some of my articles to hobbies and things like YouTube as they’re likely to have a reasonable amount of free time at that age. The design of my product will also be affected my audience, I will include active imagery with young models that my readers will be able to engage with and bright colours with high image:text ratios.
Your unique selling point	The unique selling point of my magazine is that it offers advice and tips and encourages readers to be entrepreneurial in a way that other technology magazines like Wired and Stuff do not. That is why I have included articles like ‘How to get Big on YouTube’, because YouTube is a fun hobby that can also give you a new source of income.

Overview
Description of front cover and contents page Content. Imagery to be deployed: metaphorical, ideal, window to the future self	It is crucial that I make my front cover incredibly visually appealing to my audience; it will definitely be a challenge to get people who spend most of their time on the internet to read something on paper. A technique that Stuff magazine do is put an attractive girl on the front cover to entice the reader, however I am not going to do that because my magazine is a supplement that goes along with the Northern Echo and I believe that would be against their ethics. I am going to use bright, clean colours on the front cover of the magazine, the colour white will be the most dominant and will be the colour of the background. My reason for this is white is a very futuristic colour that is associated with modern technology and I want my readers to see my magazine as very current and up to date. I will also use a light blue colour for the magazine masthead to show that this magazine is directed mainly at men. Blue is also in keeping with the modern technology theme. I am going to use san serif fonts because I believe them to be more youthful which is most suitable for my audience. I am also going to try to avoid the use of gradients and shadows because although they seemed like a good idea in my head when I added these effects in my mock ups it made the magazine look dirty and clogged up the page. The imagery that I will use on the front cover will be of a 17 year old boy, looking scared and a creeper, from the game Minecraft, will be stood behind him. The model I use for this will be handsome and well dressed, this will create a window to the future self for the audience.
Double Page 1 Title, content and article type	The title of my first double page spread is 7 Unusual Ways to Make Money. As it suggests in the title, the content of this article revolves around 7 different methods to earn cash, primarily through the internet or online. A couple of examples include becoming a gaming tutor, and putting advertisements on your car. The reason I chose to do this article is because I think it is something my audience would be very interested in as everyone wants to make a little extra cash, particularly students who are living away from home. I tried to orientate most of the different methods around being online and technology in some way because that is what the magazine’s target audience is more geared towards. The Title of this article will be a black bold font, in italics with a turquoise stroke surrounding it. The background will be plain white and the text boxes will also be turquoise and have rounded edges. Just like the rest of the magazine, I will use san serif fonts. The image to text radio will be about 4:6 and will once again contain a window to the future self for the audience.
Double Page 2 Title, content and article type	This article is about getting big on YouTube, there is a higher image to text ratio on this dps than the other ones, about 70:30. The objective of this article is to basically give you a brief overview and some top tips on what makes a successful YouTube channel. 3 different images will feature on this page, the first one will be of Nyan cat which is a character from a very successful YouTube video, the second image will be a screenshot of the video game Minecraft, the third one will be of a 17 year old man jumping in front of an explosion. This is to show that short action films do very well on YouTube. The model will be dressed in a trendy fashion and will look very cool thus creating a window to the future self for the reader. The font which I use for the title of this article will be a comical san serif one, but I will also incorporate the actual YouTube logo into the title as well. The colour scheme will be red and white to match the youtube logo, the background will be white and all headers and text boxes will be a bold red colour with white text. Red is a dynamic colour that stands out on a page and is associated with vibrancy.
Double page 3 Title, content and article type	The last DPS in my magazine is a discussion article that asks the question, is piracy bad? The article will include the opinions of many different people, including people from within the film industry and normal people who we have given a questionnaire. This page is laid out unlike the other DPSs I have created. The title is in the centre of the two pages rather than the upper left, and at the bottom of the page is an image of the ocean with a pirate ship. This is a pun of the word piracy. The background will be a light blue to slightly darker blue gradient which imitates the sky. All of the text boxes will be cartoon cloud shaped with a white background and a black san serif font within them, some of the clouds will display graphs using the data that was collected by my questionnaire. Extended language will be used on this page because it will be an in-depth discussion about the rights and wrong of piracy.

Distribution objectives

Free to view, supplement, retail? Circulation: how many and why this number? Outlets and rationale: Pricing: premium, mid or free to view? Why? Print quality: Discuss print finishing, magazine size, paper quality. Number of pages. Advertising to content ratio

Shortcut is going to be a supplement that comes along with The Northern Echo, 40,000 copies will be printed because that is how many the Northern Echo sell daily. 52% of Northern Echo readers are male, although not all of them are the correct age group. Many of the people who buy The Northern Echo are parents and will hopefully pass on the magazine to their teenage children. The magazine size will be A4 so that it doesn’t look like a newspaper and put off teenage audiences. The paper quality will be GSM coated paper. Of the 12 pages, about ¼ of them will be advertisements; this should eventually create good profit because each single page advert will be priced at £750 each and double page adverts are sold at £1500. Obviously when the magazine is first launched advertisers will not be interested in it until we develop a regular readership base. But this is normal for new magazines.

Visual Aesthetics
Story control Objectives	The first article will be 7 Unusual Ways To Make Money, this will give the audience helpful tips that help them earn a bit of extra cash, without needing any kind of qualifications, most of the methods will be internet based seen as this is a technology magazine. The second magazine is How to Get BIG on YouTube which continues the tips and tricks theme which runs throughout the entire magazine. This DPS has a high image:text ratio and discusses things like thumbnails, title names etc. The final article is called Is Piracy Bad? This article discusses the different opinions surrounding pirating media. It uses the opinions of readers, people on social media sites and people from within the film and music industry. The money article will be about 900 words long, Youtube will be 400 and Piracy will be 400 words as well.
Image content objectives	7 Unusual Ways to Make Money will include literal active imagery because it will be my model acting out several of the activities that are mentioned in the article. My model will create a window to the future self for the reader, I will use someone who is physically fit and dressed well, making the readers think that they could be like him if they did any of the methods. He will have good posture throughout all of the photographs so that he comes across as confident. The largest image on the page will be my model holding a video camera to demonstrate being a Youtube partner. I also need him playing video games with a controller, and wearing a duck mask whilst dancing, adding a little humour to the article. Is Piracy Bad is an article that will include metaphorical imagery, specifically a pirate ship on the ocean. How To Make Money On Youtube will be another article that includes a window the future self. All of the models throughout the magazine will be male and aged around 18, because this is the demographic that is most identifiable with my audience.
Language Control Objectives	The How To Make Money On Youtube and 7 Unusual Ways to Make Money will both use the same style of language and tone; a comical upbeat and slightly sarcastic. Whereas Is Privacy Bad will concentrate more on informing the reader and giving them lots of facts and information, which will hopefully provoke thought within their own minds and perhaps make them write their opinions on the Shortcut  social networking sites.
Colour control objectives	The colour of my magazine in general will be modern colours like blue and white, generally clean colours. This will make the magazine appear futuristic and therefore up to date with technology. The 3 main colours I will use are light blue, white and then black. The black will be used as the text colour because I believe this looks professional, it will also be used as a stroke on the white titles as this makes the title very clear whilst also looking very attractive. The Piracy dps will have a blue gradient background to simulate the sky, where was both the other articles will have white backgrounds. The YouTube article will use a red white and black colour scheme instead of blue white and black because I don’t want the magazine to feel to repetitive and also the red will match the Youtube logo.
Typography objectives	My Youtube dps will use Impact as the font in the title because that is the font Youtube use in their logo. It is also a very clean san-serif font that can be read from a distance with youthful connotations. My making money article will also use impact in the header, however it will be in italics, to create a more dynamic feel. The Piracy dps will actually have a completely different feel to my other articles and will use a comical cartoon font for the header, the font will be Comix loud, this will create a youthful feel but also make the article itself feel upbeat, it is important that it feels upbeat because some people might consider the article to be boring so I need to make it appear interesting.
Layout objectives	The Money dps will have three columns on each page but they will be split up to start at different levels. Because the information is split up it makes it a lot easier to read because it won’t look quite so overwhelming to the reader. The main image on my money dps will overlap with one of the text boxes slightly just to create more depth. The kicker used in this article will be descriptive but also humorous at the same time, which will hopefully encourage the readers to continue reading the entire thing.