Thanksgiving in the ATL was great (once I finally got there). It was lovely fall weather there and we even brought them some much needed rain.

One of the real treats was having lunch with September Day Leach, an Atlanta voice over talent and soon to be Los Angeles voice over talent (yes Bob, I forgot the camera again). She’ll not be falling off the Greyhound bus with stars in her eyes once she reaches the west coast…this young woman has some tremendous voice credits already including serving as the voice/announcer for the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards (check out the name on the cast list right after Avril Lavigne).

We shared many fun stories and helped lay the ground work for some seriously impressive marketing opportunities for her. Expect to be hearing her even more in the near future.

My thanks to Karen Commins, Lance Blair and Scott Pollack, September’s fellow Atlantan voice talents who wanted to join us but had commitments that didn’t allow time for my (as per usual with me) last minute get together. Maybe next time.

Tags: announcers, voice actors, voice casting, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover meet-ups by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Bob Souer and Kara Edwards were so kind to join me for dinner last night as I stopped by Charlotte, NC. And I also enjoyed having lunch with Brett Mason who has a great story about how he started in radio.

In the voice over business, it’s rare you could go into a city and NOT have someone in your voiceover network who you would know. For such a individualistic business, our networks are getting stronger all the time. My thanks to Kara, Bob and Brett.

Tags: commentary, voice actors, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog, voiceover meet-ups by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane had hoped Fox wouldn’t continue production of his show without him when MacFarlane did not report to work in support of the Writers Guild of America strike, saying of the idea of producing his show without him: “it would just be a colossal dick move if they did.”

Well they are and it is.

Look, I get that they may own the show (at least partially assuming MacFarlane didn’t entirely get squashed during the last negotiations to bring it back after it was cancelled) and I also get that Fox has a network to program.

But these characters are critical to the show and while others can impersonate the voices, it would be a bad move long term. This strike will end but the bad feelings may not regardless of future revenue possibilities.

And woe to the voice talent who takes the interim gig…like he won’t be black balled. Except for maybe one or two exceptions, he may get lots of money short term but he’ll likely be back to doing convenience store ads for basic cable as soon as the strike is over.

Tags: tv, voice actors, voice casting, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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The great thing about being asked “what do you do for a living?” is telling people that I am a voice over talent which often times is followed up by “what’s a voice over talent?” I get to tell them about my business because they asked me…I didn’t force explaination on them. That is a sales person’s dream!

The bad thing about that scenario is how often it happens and how monotonous the explaination can feel after a while.

Well leave it to voice talent and teacher Bettye Zoller to spend the time to define it for all of us so we can just send people to a web site after they back up the Brinks truck with the oodles of money they’re going to pay us for our voice over talent.

I really enjoyed the part where she rattled off examples of the type of work we do because I often forget a few:

Voiceover talents today are hired to narrate audio books, anime, cartoons, videos, films, and cable TV programs. They are the voices of toys, talking picture frames, cell phone messages, talking greeting cards, your car’s GPS navigation system, and everything else that’s manufactured with a computer chip inside of it on which a voice track can be stored and played. Voiceover talents greet you (and annoy you!) on thousands upon thousands of those pesky recorded telephone messages and IVR systems. They talk to you through ceiling speakers while you shop in stores. You hear voiceover talents trying to convince you to buy cosmetics at your department store on a video playing over and over (looping) next to those expensive cosmetic products! The military uses voiceovers in training projects and the educational field also uses voice actors for educational endeavors. Nearly every classroom today, kindergarten through post-graduate study in universities sports a large TV monitor in a corner on which educational videos are played. Sometimes, it seems that a teacher doesn’t talk very much anymore. Rather, schools teach a majority of the time with videos.

Thanks Bettye for taking the time to slap that together. You can read the whole article here if you like.

Tags: announcers, character voices, commentary, narrations, podcasting, radio, tv, voice actors, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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That would be the title that the folks as Voices.com choose not to use for their latest e-book entitled Internet Marketing Plan for Voice Actors. I was given an advanced copy and asked by my friend Stephanie Ciccarelli to do a review on audio’connell’s voiceover blog on!

She’s read my blog before so you know right off that top that if she asked me for a review, she’s one brave business woman! You never know what’s going to fly off this keyboard.

My quick hit review is this: it’s a good product for those voice actors who have no internet savvy at all. For those voice actors for whom web 2.0 sounds like double the upgrade of their current web capabilities, they will find some good stuff in here. Some parts I thought were really well thought out including the sections on Internet Marketing Strategies, Internet Links, and Social Media.

I’ve long said that the Voices.com founders were very web savvy based on their name change alone which was brilliant (they were formally known as Interactive Voices but then invested in the domain, Voices.com, smartly re-branding to their present day success). This is a company that has embraced Web 2.0 like a sailor on shore leave. They know how to market on the internet. And they have the best customer service in their industry.

But my problem with the e-book is that it really is only a primer and lacks some depth and fleshing out of topics that would be critical to a “newbie’s” basic understanding of web marketing. While it would be unrealistic to ask this book to go into the minutia of web marketing, to me, there were glaring omissions:

• For a book that is primary but not exclusively targeted at the uninitiated in web marketing, why not spend a page at the beginning of the book to tell the reader how they should use the book. Parts of it should be read in detail, some contents could be covered as needed…but the setting of expectations in an introduction page might help those who really don’t know what to expect from marketing on the web. It might be as easy as taking the book’s sales pitch and fleshing that out a bit more.

• Some of the statistics in the book, while not key to web marketing, might be misleading for anyone using this book as a “how to marketing book” versus its main purpose as an internet marketing book (and since there aren’t many “voice actor marketing planning” books out there, the desperate VO’s may try and adapt this text for traditional marketing plans). Quoting a heretofore unheard of company (among my marketing executives’ circle anyway) called Common Sense Advisory, it was noted that “total industry revenue for the language services industry, including language translation and voice-over recording, was more than $8.8 billion worldwide in 2005.” I sure would like to know in a lot greater detail how that pie is sliced up exactly otherwise that number kinda sounds like a bunch of hooey (“hooey” is the Latin term for baloney)

• The ad promo budget, even for a beginner, seems very rudimentary and could easily be expounded upon to help readers comprehend it more fully, plan better and make more successful choices

• Finally, there is a dearth of practical examples in many of the points shared (both in text and graphic form) and that may be the greatest omission of all, especially for new internet marketers. One of many opportunities missed here would be in the logo section (communicating how to purposefully create logos and use them), where examples of one company’s logo might show a main logo, a secondary logo and how and why/how they might be used on the web

All this does not mean I hate the book. I do not. I think it was an in-house publication and it reads as if it was edited that way. As voice talents often require a second set of ears on their productions, this e-book required an outside set of eyes.

Internet Marketing Plan for Voice Actors was/is in need of an outside editor to help the authors at Voices.com expound on concepts that the company is very qualified to write about. Three quarters of it is there, a professional editor could help take this worthwhile concept the other twenty-five percent of the way.

Tags: commentary, voice actors, voice casting, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voices.com by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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There are some voice talents for whom it’s a stressful process but I really enjoy the process of producing voice over demos. I love reviewing the work, picking which cuts to use, freshening some segments that were poorly produced (and making the voice sound better) and then of course, the fun of picking the order. It’s a really enjoyable process.

Except when it’s my voice over demo that I’m working on.

Don’t misunderstand, I still like the process but the challenge of the effort when it’s your own work is tougher. Why? Because as voice talents we are each too close to our own work to be as objective as we can be for others. We voiced the spots or narrations, maybe we even produced the final production; the client paid us so they must have liked it, it must have been good, maybe even good enough for the demo reel. Or is it?

Look, the demo is the VO’s calling card, our billboard on the audio super highway, and it can be the difference between getting a job and not getting a job. It’s between 1-2 minutes that will decide “feast or famine”.

For my new commercial demo, I knew there were some spots I wanted to add that I just hadn’t gotten around to putting in. There was a national spot for Shell Oil Company and a big regional spot I did for the New Jersey Board of Tourism that I felt should be included, among others.

While as a demo producer I know how to produce great demos…I also know how much I can either “not hear” or “over hear” in my own work. Mistakes in either direction can lead to a “famine” demo.

I needed to call for backup.

The key to this back up process is to go to a set (or sets) of ears you trust. You need to understand your backup’s experience in audio production, voice over and demo production. A great set of ears has respected credentials in all those areas. In this instance, my backup does what I have often done for personal friends in the biz which is to actually re cut the demo into the order that might work better. On my demo, my back up made the right changes, in my opinion.

So as not to over step the favor my back up offered on my demo and risk a deluge of requests of him for demo help, I’ll merely say thanks Frank for your help (there’s only about 250 Franks in the VO biz so good luck sifting through them).

Give this new demo a listen and let me know what you think (it’s OK if you want to critique it).

Tags: commentary, commercials, marketing, narrations, voice actors, voice casting, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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