Many of you for your long Essay are writing about a publicity campaign either for a film or for a CD. When you are doing this, it can be easy to lump together all of the different publicity materials that you analyse as if they appear in the same kind of way. This is totally untrue.

In fact, you can make very good points about the different levels of control that the media producers have over the publicity materials that we as an audience receive.

In some cases, producers have quite a degree of control: if they make a trailer, a poster or any other form of advert, they have total control over the actual text that we receive. Of course that is not the same as saying they control our reactions to this text and in your analysis you need to look at the way that they have encoded messages and used anchorage to create connotations and the different possible ways that we can decode these messages.

At the opposite extreme to this, there are some types of publicity which are generally out of the control of the producers. The reviews which a film or CD receives, and the way that members of the audience talk about it [word of mouth] is very difficult for them to have any effect over. They will try, however, by staging glitzy press screenings where the reviewers are pampered so much that the producers hope they won't dare give the film a bad review.

The sort of middle ground between these two extremes is in publicity such as interviews with the stars of a film or a rock group. In this case, the media producers can try to control what goes on -- they can tell the stars what to talk about and they even often forbid the interviewers from asking certain kinds of questions. This will result in a certain level of control over what appears in the interview. However in the interview as it appears in a magazine or television programme the star's words will have been edited and their meaning anchored in all kinds of ways which may upset the producers no end. In your Essay you should try to separate what the star said from the anchorage it receives in the context of the media text.

Whatever the publicity that you are analysing, you need to bear all of this in mind and make these kinds of comparison. In every case that you look at asked these questions:

Have the film or record company produced these messages alone or have they been mediated by other people -- newspaper or television editors?

What have the film all record company done in order to anchor the meaning of the text?

What effect have newspaper or television editors had on this message?

How much control have the different media organisations had over the final message?

How much freedom do the audience have over the way they decode these messages?

Steve Baker 19 10 97