Poster advertisement

Background Research into Poster Advertisement

There are many ways of advertising a local newspaper, here are just a couple of examples: business cards, television advertising and coupons. Although these may be very useful for national newspapers it is not the best type of advertising for local newspapers. Even though there are national newspapers that do use television advertising majority use poster advertisements as the television advertising is so expensive. 
Here is an example of the Daily Telegraph advertisement:

The best type of advertising for local newspapers would be posters/billboards, this is because they can easily put up a poster in their local town advertising their local newspaper - this would attract the right audience and the newspaper would be available to them. However if the local newspaper was to be advertising in a different town 15 miles away it not be  easy access and then the advertising would have been wasted as they cannot buy the newspaper unless traveling the distance. 

Posters are made to aware the public of their product, grabbing their attention and drawing them in enough to make them want to purchase the local newspaper. Posters of local newspapers inform the readers, if it is by explaining by graphology or lexis. Posters tend to be little writing, squeezing in the most important information in as little words as possible. 


I found it very hard to find example of local newspapers being advertised, so I decided to analyse a national newspaper poster advertisement. 

I found these poster advertisements on Google images and I printed them off and annotated them by writing on my opinion of what I thought each advertisement included. From both of these national newspaper poster advertisements I found that both of the images were the main part of the advertisement. This is because people are more drawn to images then text. People are more likely to remember that colourful image that triggered a connotation of their past than lots of text on the page that they didn't stop to read in the street because they were in a hurry.

My Local Newspaper Advertisement

After I had completed the research into poster advertisements for newspapers I began thinking of what I was going to do for my newspaper advertisement.

I knew that I wanted to include text but to have an image that was attention grabbing and took up most of the A3 page. From this I went to brain storm. 

From previous lessons I was prone to using the website Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/ 

Here is an example of Wordle:

As you can see that the key words are larger and bolder so this shows that the are more important.

Yet I knew from using the software of Wordle I was not able to make an image and from this, so I went researching images that were made with words. 

I found these examples:

What I found interesting about all of these images was that they included key words that related to the image. This was convenient as it related to Wordle.

I went onto thinking about the images I could create with just using words. I found this very difficult as it was a local newspaper and I could only include images that related to my newspaper and that the whole community would understand. 

My ideas were:

- A newspaper

- Community photo

- Public transport

Yet when thinking about it I thought that these posters would be very difficult to create, I knew I still wanted to do use words to make an image. 

I thought about creating the Masthead using words. This was be recognisable to the public as they would     automatically link the Masthead to their local newspaper. 

After drawing a sketch of the masthead I then went onto Indesign and copied the masthead from my newspaper into a A3 page then enlarged the masthead, made a new layer, made a list of word that connoted to the Haverhill Weekly Gazette. I then went to adding the words to the layer of the Haverhill Weekly Gazette, starting with Gazette as it was the largest. Arranging the words in the shape of each letter. Hiding the layer of the masthead occasionally to check that the words were correctly placed, after getting a guide from the original masthead I was then able to add the words with the masthead not on show. 

Here is an image of my poster advertisement so far:

I wanted to keep my image as close to the masthead as possible so I knew that I was going to using the text colour of "Haverhill Weekly" in red. 

First finished draft:

Analysing my first finished draft

Originally my idea was to complete the whole of the masthead by using text to write the words, however after completing this I have found that I am not as keen on 'Haverhill Weekly' written with the font, I think that it takes away the attention from 'gazette', having 'gazette' just written in connotation words from local newspaper is more unique and then the public and intended audience will relate the masthead from the newspaper to the advertisement poster. 

So I shall go on to complete my newspaper advertisement by keeping 'gazette' how it is and then using the original masthead for the 'Haverhill Weekly'. 

Second finished draft:

Analysing my second finished draft
From this you can see that I used the original 'Haverhill Weekly' from the masthead. I also included the website for the Haverhill Weekly Gazette.
Even though this was my my plan I have noticed that it does not look right, the page is too empty and the background is too white and does not give out the right vibe.
I shall now go onto transferring this format into Photoshop so I am using a different programme and I will experiment by using different colours and including images until I decide on something that is suitable for a local newspaper poster advertisement. 

Third finished draft:

From PhotoshopI played around with the colours and the masthead that I had created through text. I definitely wanted to the masthead in my final poster advertisement as it was my initial idea and I was happy with the outcome that I had produced although I now did not want it to be the main focus for my poster advertisement. 

Final Draft:

Even though I decided not to include a printscreen version of my front cover of my local newspaper. I decided to use just the image itself as it doesn't just connote one copy of the newspaper but many this is mainly due to the newspaper being a local; it would not have the budget of a nation newspaper so they would not have the money to produce a poster advertisement for their local newspaper weekly, so inside of just using this poster for a week they are able to use it for a year as it does not specify a specific issue. 

From my final outcome of my newspaper I am extremely happy with the outcome. When looking back at my original idea I think I have come very far, still using the small text to create the masthead and including an image, in the shape of breast cancer logo shape, connotes giving and that is what I want for my local newspaper to be about, a community and from that I think my poster advertisement advertises that very well.