2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

To make my products look professional and stand out from the rest of the competition I needed to have consistency between my main product and ancillary texts. Stephen Neale said 'Genres contain a set of expectations'. This consistency was achieved through various methods, most notably the application of the same colour scheme, logo and slogan on to each of my platforms.

Research has shown that consistency throughout different platforms attracts more readers, whereas inconsistency lacks the promotional impact required to sell copies. With this research in mind I aimed to transfer as many of the details that make my product original over to my poster and radio in order to reach out to my target audience more effectively. These pictures show how I used the same logo on my main product in my ancillary product.

I differed from typical poster conventions by not including my slogan 'The people's choice' and chose instead to elaborate by adding 'Your news, your voice' which I believe is more effective for my poster. It follows the same style as the top text of the poster (with two questions in bold with red and blue backgrounds) and keeps the flow of the poster punchy and dynamic. I did however include my slogan 'The people's choice' in my radio advert as it fitted in well with the dialogue of the advert. I believe not including the slogan in my poster was a positive choice so that it doesn't get overused and stagnant from using it across every platform, although some may argue that not including the slogan creates inconsistency. I have had mixed views on how effective my poster is through my feedback. I decided to go with what I thought was most suitable since the opinions were so varied.

The production of my poster supports the encoding/decoding theory. As the producer I encoded my poster with the questions 'Need a voice of the local people? Need a paper that tells it how it is?' to try and imply that my newspaper provides these things (whereas other newspapers may not). However, the cultural competence theory states that my audience may have decoded my poster with different meanings to what I intended, although I believe my poster gets its message across very clearly. This encoding and decoding makes my ancillary text effective when used in conjunction with my main product as it makes the reader think about the poster rather than passing it by unnoticed.