Critical Reflection

THE END

To summarize it all, my group Sofia Lander, Gerardo Leon, and I worked together to create a promotional campaign as well as a music video for a local band called PLUTO. We chose the option to do the music promotion project which was the best choice we did. From this project we grew and learned so much, we got so many experiences that if it weren’t for this they wouldn’t have been possible. 

In our project, we are working alongside PLUTO, the band which is made of 5 members; Mia, Jaden, Jack, Gabbie, and Cameron. Even though we did not have the liberty to choose from different social groups due to the fact that they're a band and we couldn’t change the members, they are all still from all around the world. To begin with Mia, the drummer was born in Philly however her family is from Ukraine. Then Gabbie, the singer, was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and later moved to Florida when she was 14 years old. Also, Cameron, the guitarist, is Guyanese-American, she was born in America however she has citizenship for Guyana. Jade, the guitarist, was born in Miami Dade and has lived here in Florida for her whole life. In addition, Jack was born in New Jersey and now lives here in Florida, he is ethnically half Jewish and half Colombian. Even though we weren’t able to pick the band members we are lucky to have worked with a group filled with diversity and so many different cultures. 

Our brand is very consistent throughout the project. The band's logo is composed of the colors red and purple so we decided to take this along and make it our consistent theme. We created an Instagram account to help promote the band and all the posts we did were filled with both the purple and red tone colors. All the actual Instagram posts were posted with a purple filter or background. Then later did the same with all the stories and highlights we posted. We choose to always stay consistent with these colors. Later when creating the digipack we went with purple backgrounds for most of the sides except one which is composed of a line of different shades of purple to red. We wanted to demonstrate a sense of branding through these colors as they represent the band. The brand was also created as a very casual image. The band didn’t want anything that looked too rehearsed. They like to give a more relaxed and real sense to their fans so this is what we went along with through the project, it is what we showed on our social media since everything that we posted was very raw footage with nothing too edited. This is how we demonstrated the brand of the band, as a group of fun teenagers who create music because it is their passion, something chill. 

Throughout the project, we created engagement in many ways. The main one was through Instagram @________plutotheband and our blogs. This is how we kept the followers of the band engaged. They got to see behind the scene footage and learn more about the band members. We also posted posters of the band's future gigs so the fans could be informed of where and when the band was going to play. In the Instagram story, we posted many surveys to see our fan engagement and help them get excited for new things coming. Something special we did was a contest where the fans could win the opportunity to be a part of the music video and meet the band exclusively. We believed that this would create a  lot of engagement and help the band get out there especially since one of the requirements to participate in the music video was the fact that they had to repost one of our posts so this would help other people learn about who PLUTO the band is. In our posts, we used hashtags in order to be able to reach our target audience which was mainly teenagers, this is also why we choose to promote the brand through Instagram. Through our blogs, we would post our research, our ideas, and a more first-person point of view of how the project was going in order for our followers to understand the process and know why we did what we did. Later, we also released the music video through YouTube since this is where all music videos can be found and we believed that this would be perfect for the band to grow in recognition since people have easy access to it. 

Before starting anything we created a lot of research, we looked at the biggest rock bands and their music videos, as well as researched the target audience. One of the main research we did was to understand what rock was, and how it influenced society and fashion. We researched The Rolling Stones and Queen. However, the biggest rock bands that inspired PLUTO were Papa Roach, Nothing But Thieves, and Maneskin. When we learned who their biggest inspirations were we began to look at their music video and what they did. We discovered that all the music videos were very casual and spontaneous, nothing too scripted so that was the route we decided to take with PLUTO since we wanted to do something according to what they liked. When we did our target audience research we found out that Rock is not that popular amongst teenagers, however, this was the audience that we were trying to reach. So we decided to challenge the conventions and do everything in our power to reach our desired audience. All the gigs that the band did were in places that were filled with Millennials and Generation Z, for example at our high school's homecoming as well as their 20th-year anniversary. These are places filled with students and this was helping us attract who we wanted to attract. Also using Instagram which is very popular amongst teenagers was the perfect plan to reach the audience we wanted since the main users of Instagram are Generation Z. Later, we did not try to challenge the basic Rock conventions, Rock is a very passionate genre and that is what we demonstrated through the music video and our social media page, we demonstrated the passion the band has for what they do and how they are trying to express their emotions in a liberating way which is what Rock is. 

Overall, this was an amazing experience and I got to personally live something that gave me so much more knowledge. It helped me understand what working with a real-life customer in marketing and production is like. Through the good times and the bad times, the project has come to an end and it was actually so much fun and I’m so thankful we got to meet this amazing band and work with them on this project, so thankful that they let us do this for them and we hope you guys all liked it as much as we did.