Ancillary Research - Magazine album advertisement

The second part of my ancillary text, for my project, is the magazine advertisement for the album, which will feature in music magazines that will criteria to the genre of music I am focusing on.

This is an advertisement for the artist 'Plan B' and his album 'The Defamation Of Strickland Banks', this is an example of how a conventional magazine album advertisement looks, there are many techniques which are used here that can be used as inspiration for my magazine advertisement as the conventions it uses are very eye catching.
The title, showing the artists name, is big and bold and the use of the red colour against the black background makes it stand out and the first thing the readers eye is drawn to. this is followed by slightly smaller words which show the name of the album, this time in white, as the white is also placed against the black background it stands out just as much as the red. By having white, red and black as the colour scheme the words all stand out especially as the red lines of words are separated by white lines (if all the font was either red or white the effect wouldn't be the same and would be less impressive).

This is the album cover for the album which is being advertised above, the colour scheme is the same here as it was in the magazine advertisement, this creates an impression of repetition and continuity throughout this album release making the reader associate the advertisements and the album together.






The use of all the headings and sub-headings being in bold uppercase letters it gives the reader the impression that this is an important piece of information and that they must keep reading on. Underneath the big titles and bold colours there are nine star ratings from various magazines and newspapers, these star ratings all show the same rating, four out of five, which is an impressive score but the main point is that at nine  different magazines and newspapers have all separately agreed on a high score, although some of these magazines and newspapers are not renowned for their album ratings (such as 'the big issue') the magazine 'Q' is in that list and is one of the biggest music magazines in the industry.

This magazine album advertisement is also very effective but is very different from the previous one. This advertisement is very simple, holding a pink tinted version of the front cover of the album cover art as it's background, the extremely large black lettering stands out creating an almost urgent feel to it, as if the information is vital.
the tag line used here forms around 70% of the page making it the most visually striking aspect of the page. The "What did you expect from the Vaccines?" could be seen as an ambiguous tag line as the question could mean one thing to one person and a different thing to another. The question also takes a bragging tone as it is placed above the reviews of three four star ratings from three major music magazines, as if saying "of course we got four stars we're the Vaccines!" 
All the necessary information is also here including the record label and an image of the album cover so that readers can recognize it when they're next shopping but also in the bottom left hand corner of the page is the logo for the popular internet shopping site, 'Play.com', this shows the readers where they can buy the album but also because of the confident and ambiguous tag line it could also be seen as suggesting that as soon as the reader views this advertisement they will be rushing about trying to buy the album and it has supplied you with a way of getting it.

These two advertisements both hold simplistic but highly useful attributes which I am looking at carrying on to my project, the use of big lettering and simple backgrounds makes the readers attention stay on the content and the use of ambiguity and confidence in the album is a very interesting and alternative technique which will inspire my work.