Portfolio work- Branding and Marketing task.

In class we started to look at how we can brand and market our chosen artists or band. To did this we started off with a small task to re-brand a jaffa cake. After studying the product my group came up with a name: UFO - Utterly Fantastic Orange. We thought this because of the shape looking like an alien space ship. Next we thought of an audience an thought that it would be sold to people in the C-D-E group in the social class pyramid and would be fun for all the family. Finally we thought of marketing with the product sponsoring the TV programme 'My Parents are Aliens'. We would have a Facebook page and Twitter page. We would make an ad for Youtube and TV, and would have bill board ads. Finally we would have promotions in supermarkets and competitions, mainly focused at younger children. 
We then thought of how Branding and Marketing will be applied to our artist or band:-

We then looked at a great example of a new artist from today that had to be Marketed. We looked at the artist Ed Sheeran, who has been described as not a typical looking music artist, with people thinking he doesn't look appealing but has a good voice. To get his music out his label company ( Warner Music Group ) came up with this music video:-

 

This music video "You Need Me, I Don't Need You" was first released onto Youtube in July 2011. The music video was directed by Emil Nava and features 17 year old signing actor Matthew Morgan who signs the lyrics to the song. The genre of this song is hip hop soul, funck rock and R&B.

 This music video is very intreresting as there are only fleating glances of Ed Sheeran himself, giving a scence of enigma. The video is filmed entirelly in Black and White, keeping details to a minimum. Overall the basic idea from Ed Sheeran's music label is to not show him as much as possible (in fact he is only shown 13 times in the whole video) and to focus mostly on his music.

 

 From this, in class, we decided that Ed Sheeran's record label hold most of the power in the decision of creating his music videos and how Ed Sheeran is portrayed in them. However we were later shown this article:- 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/feb/02/behind-music-record-labels 

In this article, we are told that Ed Sheeran started off with his producer and were able to attracted a fair amount of fans and get very high into the charts without a record label however it is plain to see from his first set of music videos (such as 'The a Team' and 'Lego House') that if Ed Sheeran had any freedom and creativity in making his own music videos and having a say in what happens with his music videos that, surly he would be shown in them more frequently and in more detail, rather than almost being hidden from the viewers because of his image that some people would say as not complying with the main stream look of indie/folk/acoustic genre that he is classed as.

Here are the two other Music Videos that where listed about to give an example of the possible contradiction between Ed Sheeran's artistic freedom and the label companies control. :- 

 

 

In the video above Ed Sheeran appears for the most of 2 minutes staring as a pedestrian that stops to talk to the main girl and give her some spare change.

 

In this video Ed Sheeran is hinted at quite a lot as the video portrays an obsessed  fan. He is then show in physical form in the last seconds of the video.