Summer Research Task - Methods of Promotion

conduct research into how media products are brought to market and to the awareness of the audience

Artists are promoted in a number of ways. initially, artists were promoted through the form of top of the pops. Top of the Pops, also known as TOTP, is a British music chart television programme, made by the BBC and originally broadcast weekly between 1 January 1964 and 30 July 2006. It was traditionally shown every Thursday evening on BBC1. Before the era of the internet and social media, this was the only way that artists were recognised. As times changed and social media progressed, artists found new ways of publicising their music. This is particularly highlighted by Taylor Swift in 2014 when she was publicising her long awaited video 'bad blood'.

Swift got her famous pals together to star in her music video which massively helped publicise her video as different fanbases were being appealed to for the same product. Furthermore, all of the famous faces used social media to appeal to their fans as its cheap and effective. By doing so they posted posters of their characters on instagram, twitter, Facebook etc. and counted down the days until the video was to be aired on youtube, another free social media platform. 

In the modern day we see far more use of social media to interact with people over things such as Facebook viral videos and adverts, twitter hashtags, instagram likes and adverts on online newspaper articles. This creates a sense of community within the fanbase, unifying them all (especially when a celebrity refers to their fanbase with a special name such as beyonce's fanbase 'beyhive'). In addition, we also see other stars and celebrities doing sponsored instagram posts etc. This is where company's approach stars and pay them to post a picture with their product and write a caption explaining the benefits. Different stars can recieve different payments, some celebs from love island (for example) recieve around £300-500 for a post whereas big stars such as kylie jenner has been rumoured to recieve $450,000 for a sponsored post.

• are there any innovative examples of promotion you can find?
• how has technical convergence and the proliferation of hardware changed how films/music products are marketed?