Flawless Victory
Here are two promotional commercials I found to be very effective. These commercials are often played during Headbanger's Ball on MTV2. The commercials were made by Victory Records to promote their bands. Therefore they are definitely targeted to a certain audience because viewers of Headbanger's Ball would be interested in the type of music promoted.
The commercial begins with a screen showing thumbnails of bands and says choose your fighter. This plays off of the Mortal Kombat audio and Interface. The commercial then proceeds to show music video /audio of six of the bands. In addition to showing the music video, the album is shown along with saying In Stores Now. If you like what you hear, you know who the band is and what their album is called. Then at the end of the commercial "Victory Records in Combat with corporate rock" appears.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZyp_pGRgi0&NR=1
http://youtube.com/watch?v=yqv5aEjvGog
Honestly I found these commercials to be very effective. I recall being at a friends house one night and when I heard one of the bands I saved the band name in my text messages so that once I got home I could find out who the band was and listen to more of their music. It's a quick way to introduce many bands to an audience at once.
Victory also does a decent job in promoting one band at a time. They make 30 second CD promos with the music video in the background while the band name and album title appear on the screen, informing the audience of who the band is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCaXF_tEh8g
Here's another one where it's like the songs are actually battling one another. It is more similar to the actual Mortal Kombat where two players(the two bands) are fighting one another and life/energy is taken away.I don't particularly find this one as effective as the other battles because it is not very clear which band is playing. There is too much information on the page and so much is going on that you don't really get anything from it.
I would have to agree that the last site has too much going on. It is hard to focus on which band you are hearing and what they're name is along with what song they are singing and who they are "battling" with. I found the same difficulty with the first two, but I think it was because of how much was going on in the music videos behind the text. I think that for this genre these commercials are very effective because the commercial has a lot going on in it as does the songs that are being advertised
Submitted by physicschic on Sat, 03/01/2008 - 23:43.I agree with both of you that the last youtube video is very hard to figure out which band was playing at which time. It would be an effective promotion of the band if it was more clearly defined which band was playing at which time. Also each song only gets a tiny snippet of play time so it's hard to really know what the song it all about. I mean it lets you get an idea of the genre of music, but not really what the band is all about. Overally this isn't a very effective strategy the way it is done, and while I think it is creative, I don't think it will ever be very effective at really promoting a band. Although it does give you an idea of the genre of the music and allow you the chance to google the artist name.
Submitted by matt33172 on Sun, 03/02/2008 - 14:28.