Female Voice Talent and Voice Over Coach Deb Munro

Just got pinged by Deb Monro following her high seas voice over adventure that she’ll be in Toronto on November 7th and 8th with Dave McRae (voice talent and coach I’m told) and Roger King from PN Agency (Roger wasn’t able to make it to our class when I studied with Deb a few years ago).

The two days will cover Selecting Styles & Talking Audio Voice Workshops. The weekend will cost you $395 but she’s told me that you’ll get a discount if you tell her I referred you AND she told me I’ll get $25 for every person I refer who registers for the event until October 23rd.

BUT because I am a nice guy, ask Deb to please credit MY $25 to your tuition on top of the discount she gives you. I do not want price to be a barrier to your training opportunity. Contact Deb via email (workshops@micnme.com), phone (604-459-5559) or web (www.MicnMe.com).

Enjoy your training with Deb, I know I did. And tell Roger I said hi.

Tags: voice over workshop, voice talent, voiceover advice // 3 Comments »

Fellow voice over talent Roy Bunales introduced me to something on his Facebook page that I thought was very interesting. It was a video that I guess has been around for over a year and has had close to 2 million views. The video is below, it’s four minutes long and I’d like you to STOP reading now watch it and then return back here for a second for a brief discussion below the video.

Let me ask you honestly…did you see that ending coming? I didn’t see it coming but on Roy’s feed, their was no title. If you were watching on TV, you wouldn’t have seen that coming either.

What a story.

Were you bothered by the length? I wasn’t at all, I was engaged, yet its payoff very much made it a commercial.

What a story.

And that’s the message for you today: story.

We went through a time and place where if an image was on a screen for a half second, that was too long. Then it couldn’t be just one image, it had to be multiple images.

Now we are an audience in throes of on-going sensory overload. We tune out advertising more than we tune in.

How, then, do you make an actual impression in the viewer or listener’s mind: story.

Share a story (not tell).

Offer a message (not promote).

Develop a relationship (don’t talk down).

Create a community (not build an audience).

It will resonate with the viewer and they will bond with the message, the product or service. I will not soon forget this brand…nor will you I think.

Not all stories are great but a great story will fill an enormous void. When was the last time your advertising or marketing shared a story? Funny or dramatic?

What’s your reaction to this? Am I being unrealistic? Or did this message find you more deeply engaged than most advertising?

P.S. So a bit after I published this, I came across the following video that I think illustrates my point even more…by helping shift the way consumers might think about a company…German engineering made “fun”.

Tags: advertising, commentary, commercials, marketing, media, video // 3 Comments »

i-posts are short updates written on my i-phone using my wordpress blog app.

Things like this always happen. October 24 when I’ll be in Atlanta at a Marice Tobias workshop (which I am very much looking forward to) there will be a networking mixer in Toronto hosted by Voices.com.

But just because I’ll be unable to attend doesn’t mean you should miss out.

Below is the link to the facebook invite I received. If you’ve never been to Toronto, it’s a great excuse to check out a great city.

http://m.facebook.com/event.php?eid=163317597160

Tags: i-post, social networking, voice actors, voiceover, voiceover meet-ups, voices.com // 1 Comment »

I love the TV jingles too (ABC, NBC and CBS promos like back in the old days ) but the radio jingles have always been my fav.

So Philip Banks (he of two mentions within the same week on this blog) linked up to a video of a company he’s evidently done work with who produce among other things radio jingles. They happened to put together a short video on the production of a recent session. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

If you have a favorite radio station jingle (or package) don’t hesitate to link to it in the comments. We are an equal opportunity fun sharing blog.

Tags: commentary, video // 3 Comments »

Peter K. O'Connell's Twitter account (audioconnell) was graded 96 out of 100!

So I was cruising through my tweets scanning if anything interesting was going on when I came across a tweet on something called TweetGrader.

Gasp, you exclaim, another Twitter app; they’re like McDonalds – over a billion served!

Yeah yeah blah blah, there’s even a Twitter app store (like the Apple app store only its not).

But that’s my grade up there on my virtual refrigerator. A score of 96 out of 100 for my twittering. Evidentally out of the 4,903,743 people twittering our mindlessness for all to read, I rank 193,671.

I am evidently aces at this mindlessness stuff.

Clearly I have found my calling, every guidance counselor would agree.

Further, it told me “We could not find any areas of concern with this twitter account. Tweet on!”

And so I shall but I shant flaunt my “waaaay better than you” grade in your face because that wouldn’t be nice.

Tags: social media, social networking, technology, twitter // Comments Off on smarter than I thought

I have a really odd habit of skimming over some big new product or service announcement and ignoring it until someone gives me a really understandable explanation of how the product or service really works. Rather than an “early adopter”, I’m more of an “adopt it when I get around to it” type guy.

Case in point, Google Wave is “an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

Maybe you can easily wrap your skull around that, but I can’t.

Now if I wanted to throw away an hour of my time I could watch this video but I don’t. I can’t be bothered because I’m a skimmer or I’m impatient…it all depends on what I’ve had for breakfast but that’s not my point.

My point is that this video here is awesome tool for learning about Google wave and likely anything else this company wants to teach me.

I don’t know who epipheo studios are but if they make stuff like this you should hire them.

Tags: animation, commentary, marketing, video // Comments Off on new tool, cool explaination