Codes and Conventions of Radio Trailers

Inside Out - Madeleine Foundation

Dramatic music is used throughout this advert to build suspense and create an up tempo beat through the continuous drum beat to keep the pace of the advert steady. At the end of the documentary, a drum beat which is the ident of the channel is played. The formal and dramatic language of the narration does not answer any questions but give the audience more to give the the advert an enigmatic sense. The narration also gives a brief explanation of the topic for the documentary, the date, time, channel and name of the documentary. Sound bites from the documentary are heard to give the audience an idea of what the documentary would be like if they watched it. These sound bites create more enigmas rather than solving them to encourage the audience to watch the documentary.

Royal Family Documentary

This advert has been given an exciting and youthful twist through the use of guitars. This is to make the documentary appeal to a younger audience as well as the older audience who would normally be interested in the Royal Family. The narrator in this advert reinforces what the show is about, making it sound exciting and new to anything else we have seen of the Royal Family before. Sound bites from the documentary are used as well which include clips of the Queen talking as well as the Princes to establish who the Royal Family are. There is no ident in this radio advert meaning that the only branding is when the narrator says that the documentary is on the BBC.

Codes and Conventions

Codes and conventions of radio trailers include brief explanations of the documentary to the target audience so they can decide if it sounds interesting. This brief explanation does not give much away about the contents of the documentary to give the advert an enigmatic style. The sound bites from the documentary also do this because they might not make sense without everything else or they could be cliffhangers, just like in a television advert. Also included in the narration is the time, date and channel or scheduling for the documentary so that everyone knows when they can watch it.
The radio trailer is always aimed at a specific target audience which is the same as the target audience for the documentary. To do this, it can either be through the language used by the narrator or the type of music in the background. Also, the channel that the documentary is on can appeal more to certain audiences than others, for example, Channel 4 typically has a younger audience than the BBC and each of these channels have different idents for their radio trailers, for their different target audiences.