Magazine Advert Analysis #1

In the following next couple of posts I will be looking at magazine adverts for the promotion of an album and the way it promotes the album in order to increase sales. Here I am looking at Jay-Z's promotional magazine advert for his album 'The Blueprint 3'. This advert I feel captures how it is possible to have something so simple and minimalist yet still highly effective. As we can see the advert has used a similar if not the same image from the album cover. This makes the album artwork iconic and symbolises his new album due to this unusual design and idea. The monochrome white musical interments etc have a great minimalist effect against the white background, therefore allowing the blood red overlaying 3 lines and text to have a greater impact and stand out to the audience. Therefore the bold serif font at the top saying 'Jay-Z' stand out to us as well as the rest of the other text due to its size and boldness as well as the fact it is serif and all other fonts are sans-serif. This allows his name to stand out more and make it recognisable. This strong contrast in white a white background with red and black in the foreground creates a high contrast allowing a pop to the image as if it were a colour splash effect.

There are two alternations in font. The main 'Jay-Z' title text at the top and all the text below in a smaller text. This can cause an unprofessional as it can be seen as breaking a certain theme or style of an image. However I think this has been nicely done so that the title just con rats with the rest of the text to stand out, rather than using the same font and it blending in. This allows the title of 'Jay-Z' and his artist name to become almost a brand image against the original rest of the text in the advert. The black and white contrast in text is a traditional look that will be aesthetically pleasing to any audience. Certain songs have been bolded that would be recognisable already to the public and therefore catch their attention as they know already about this release in the back of their mind. Furthermore the date of the release is slightly bigger than the rest of the original text to stand out and stick in the viewers mind. At the bottom below all this text colour splash is once again used with the record label brand icon with the red once again to stand out and create an iconic approach and let the viewers understand this is associated with this iconic label of Roc Nation. Below this is then the artists website which is an example of synergy as they are publishing there weskit and label as well as just the album. This would of course increase popularity and sales.