Evaluative Essay

When creating a campaign for our artist, we created a music video, Instagram page and a digipak to help advertise our artist ‘Nova Reign’ and her song ‘Golden Hour’. After researching into conventions and looking at multiple feminist theorists, we constructed a campaign that would advertise our artist as sensual yet sophisticated – subverting some typical stereotypes yet keeping her in the eye of the ‘male gaze’ to remain familiar to audiences.

When researching into the female R&B pop genre, we chose to represent our artist in a stereotypical sexualised manner in order to engage with both male and female audiences. In multiple shots of our music video, the artist is shown making sensual eye contact with the camera whilst lip-syncing as well as moving her hands up and down her body in low cut outfits to emphasize her femininity, this encourages the audience to view her through the ‘male gaze’. As well as this, we consistently put our artist in a full face of makeup so that her skin would look poreless which adheres to Jean Kilbourne’s theory claiming that women are presented as needing to be flawless. Both these attributes are similar to female R&B videos like Normani and SZA. However, in our social media page, we wanted to portray our artist in a way that she would be a role model for teens as well as those of the same ethnicity as her to allow her to seem more relatable. We contained a story highlight with the caption ‘sleepy Monday’ as she shows her no makeup face, this allows our female audience to feel more connected to the artist as she is not afraid to show her imperfections. Throughout our campaign for our artist, we subverted the stereotype highlighted by Alvarado that black people are predominantly presented as dangerous. In our digipak, our artist is photographed in  warm orange lighting, this paired with a thin cursive font helps the audience to recognise that she has a friendly aura in her star image. Although, she still wears a lowcut costume to emphasize her sexuality but the use of the low-cut garment being a blazer highlights how are artist is a strong, independent woman.

The music industry is becoming ever more popular with female R&B artists like Jorja Smith and Ella Mai, both are which young females of colour. In this new subsection of the genre, it is very typical to create a marketing campaign that consistently focuses on the artists star image and their own identity. The entirety of our music video had a sole focus on the artist ‘Nova Reign’, being portrayed as an independent feminine woman with some images being in relation to the male gaze due to the pop outlines of the video. This focus was created by containing multiple non-sync slow motion shots of the artist in a close up to emphasize her beauty. Regular costume changes portrayed her in revealing outfits like crop tops and a low-cut blazer dress to show how she is being marketed as a high fashion individual, due to the pop and R&B genre being popular with a youthful, predominantly female, it was important to make our artist look cool and edgy to appeal to teens. Richard Dyer highlights that star image is vital in creating a successful artist. Throughout our campaign we created a unique selling point to the artist as we created a familiar symbol which could be associated with our artist. Using the theme of time and therefore displaying clocks in all three of our media products: digipack, social media, and video, it created a consistent brand for our artist that made her have an edge. By displaying the theme of time throughout our campaign, it allowed our audience to associate our artist with something familiar and therefore would make her more familiar to viewers. Warm colours were used on our digipak like low-key orange lighting as well as in the music video to emphasize how our artist is chilled out and relaxed yet outputs a feminine nature; this was also a deliberate choice to make our artist look approachable and not aggressive.

As the Uses and Gratification theory specifies, it is important that our music video provides our audience with entertainment as well as escapism in order to gain popularity. The use of warm, sunset lighting throughout our video allows our audience to watch in a relaxed, dream like state. With the addition of slow-motion shots as well as a duplicate of our artist using a split screen in the editing process to provide audiences with entertaining visuals. Our music video features five different sets, including conceptual ideas like the split screen and a large swinging pendulum which provides our audience with pure escapism as these locations seem modern and high budget. To engage with our target audience, predominantly females ages 15-30 (particularly women of colour), we used high fashion outfits throughout our social media; for example, in one of our Instagram posts, our artist features in a cropped puffer jackets which is an on-trend item of clothing especially popular with young women. As well as this, on our Instagram, our artist features in an oversized shirt paired with some khaki cargo trousers – this fashion statement is on trend and therefore will encourage our adolescent female audience. In terms of engaging with women of colour, our artist is campaigned as friendly and therefore a role model to look up to as she is too a mixed-race women. We posted photos of her with friends on the social media as well as photo with the caption ‘kindness is golden’ which not only correlates to our overall campaign of the ‘golden hour’ but also allows our artist to present herself as a role model. As well as this, captioning our posts with colloquial comments like ‘sneak peek’ and ‘get excited’ with the inclusion of emojis encourages social interaction through participatory culture. In the inside of our digipak, we included a quote from our artist which helps to establish a feeling that the audience would have a personal relationship with her as it feels as if she is talking to the audience directly. The back cover of the digipak then offers a more informal approach as it provides the audience with song titles, the artist’s website and her record label which then would expand her audiences due to the information given so that viewers can access more and therefore increase profit.

Having researched into multiple videos of the female R&B pop genre, as well as looking into multiple feminist theorists like Van Zoonen, Laura Mulvey and Jean Kilbourne I discovered that typically in this genre, the women wear revealing clothing to encourage a voyeuristic viewing which is too implied by Andrew Goodwin. We dressed our artist in multiple different costumes, often low-cut pieces like shirts and figure-hugging clothing to encourage both men and women to look at the artist through the ‘male gaze’. Researching into Andrew Goodwins theories into common conventions of music videos, we linked our lyrics to the visuals throughout our artist’s campaign. In all social media, digipak and music video, an orange sunset lighting and a warm aesthetic is displayed throughout to replicate the ‘golden hour’ in which the song is named that we are advertising. As well as this, the editing of our music video matches up with the beat of the song, being more fast paced in the pre chorus to replicate the pace of the music. In both Goodwin’s theory and in female R&B videos, videos will often focus on star image where the video contains many close-up images of the artist as well as on body language and sexualized images for entertainment purposes. Our video contained multiple close up lip-syncing shots of the artist to adhere to this convention as well as slow motion shots of the artist looking directly at the camera, the digipak design also displays the artist in a close-mid shot of her looking into the camera, encouraging the audience to see her as a confident feminine women. Steve Neale’s genre theory describes how videos are interesting if combined with a mixture of repetition and difference. To keep our campaign familiar, our artist is represented as high fashion with cool makeup looks to make her more sexualized to encourage voyeurism. However, using conceptual shots like a split screen displaying the artist as a double on the screen allows the audience to keep focus and remain interested. Typically, in slow R&B videos, the lighting is often in a greyscale and desaturated in colour like Beyonce’s ‘Sorry’. However, we decided to challenge this convection to help our video come to life more especially being based on the ‘golden hour’ and therefore it was important that we replicated the meaning of the song through the use of lighting.

Overall, we created a clear brand for our artist that was thoroughly thought out during our pre-production stage that then allowed us to create a music video, digipak and social media page that would interact with our target audience. We represented multiple social issues and groups, discussing gender, ethnicity and age which allowed us to experiment with marketing and how we used or challenged conventions.