I will grant you that Dansville, New York is no Miami but sometimes you go places, not so much for the city as for the people (and I’m not sure Dansville is big enough to be a city anyway).

But such was my reason for visiting Dansville today as it was sort of a half way point between my studio and where voice talent and fellow blogger Bob Souer was visiting while he was handling some impressive audio production duties for a project in Binghamton, NY.

We had lunch at the world renowned Sunrise Restaurant (its where all the beautiful people in Dansville meet. Their rinforzi il tortino et broodje was to die for! Simply heavenly!)

For any of you who have had the chance to speak with or meet Bob, I have the same boring story to report about him: charming guy, smart guy, wonderful voice over career insights and selfless to a fault. In short (and I am much shorter than he) Bob is the exact opposite of me.

A great treat for me to connect with a great talent and even better man.

Tags: blogs, commentary, peter o'connell, voice actors, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover meet-ups // 3 Comments »

Although we’ve got something like 500+ days left before the next United States Presidential election, candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties are already having debates on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The debates are summarily ignored by the majority of the voting public even though they are covered ad-nauseum by the networks. It’s a vicious cycle.

This Presidential election has gotten the earliest campaign start in history I have been told and yet I’m convinced more people vote for singers on American Idol than for a President. I’ve nothing to back this up, research-wise, it’s more of a “gut” thing. Yet what choice do candidates have, especially those running for president?

The branding and marketing of a political candidate, public referendum or issue has become a real art or a fascinating battle depending on your perspective. How would YOU create a brand (and hopefully buzz…positive buzz) about a candidate or policy while competing for the attention of an ever more diversified and distracted voting public? Oh yeah, and you have to do it on a budget based solely on how well your candidate can fund raise…assuming he/she can get enough people who know him/her as well as who thehave money to even contribute to a campaign. That is why I guess we’re starting so early on each party’s “horse race” for the presidential brass ring. In politics as in life: follow the money.

And with the election season comes the political ads…some good, some questionable (again, trying to gain attention) but always thought provoking. Political consultants will again do their level best to map out a salient strategy for their candidate clients. These strategies will include a “theme” or “message” that consultants and candidates hope will resonate with the voters. Likely, TV and radio political ad campaigns will remain the mediums of choice to spread that political message to the widest audience.

Voice over scripts for political commercials are a great deal of fun for most voice talents (for me I refer to some of these political spots as requiring “vocal summersaults“). But overall today’s political spots are really not that different than commercials for any other brand. Political advertisers need to gain the public’s attention, summarize a key message and elicit an emotion in anywhere from thirty to sixty seconds. Sometimes the audience is uplifted by the message (“It’s morning, again, in America,)” and sometimes some mud is slung (politics didn’t invent attack ads; a quick example: wasn’t “The Pepsi Challenge” mud slinging at some of its most famous?).

I’m looking forward to the coming political advertising season whether from a presidential, congressional, state, regional or local election level. It gets citizens more involved in the democratic process for a while and I just don’t see how that can ever be a bad thing.

Tags: advertising, commentary, commercials, marketing, media, narrations, radio, tv, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover // 2 Comments »

Some things just strike me as funny.

That includes the minor misfortune of others and in this case, the “others’ happens to be the citizens of London, England.

London, you see, is home to the 2012 Olympic Summer Games, which I have no doubt will be a smashing success as Olympics go…great athletic achievements, dramatic stories of accomplishment, amazing new venues and some boon to the UK economy. All of it very impressive and deservedly so.

Except for the logo.

Every Olympics has a logo. Without it, you can’t sell Olympic t-shirts and mugs and hats and cups and lighters and bookmark and underpants and baby bibs and earrings…all of which add up to a sizable revenue chunk in any Olympic budget. So the logo has to evoke something positive about the Olympic experience, the flavor of the city the Games are being held in and ultimately be attractive. Or at least not unattractive. Or at least not suck.

Oh my but does the 2012 Olympic Summer Games logo suck…on a global scale.

The committee in London, led by Committee chairman and former British distance runner Sebastian Coe, paid the design firm of Wolff Olins over $800,000 to design the logo that all of London and eventually the world was to embrace and promote.

Except London didn’t embrace the logo. They hated it.

A BBC on-line vote with nearly 11,000 votes cast showed 85% hated the logo with 4% saying they really liked it. When introducing a new brand, these are NOT the numbers you hope for.

Need a few more facts?

This design, which comes in a variety of color schemes, when animated caused 10 people to complain about the animation of logo because some of them suffered seizures when they saw it on the official Olympic web site.

Are you going to buy a logoed product that may cause seizures?

Bless the government’s leaders as they stood by this awful design. Outgoing Prime Minster Tony Blair said “When people see the new brand, we want them to be inspired to make a positive change in their life.” Maybe it’s me but I don’t see having seizures from looking at a logo to be a positive change in my life.

The London Olympics branding web site has a gallery of “civilian” logo submissions and I think there are plenty in those galleries that would been a much better branding icon than the $800K klunker.

As an icon, there may be been uglier or dumber looking images, but from a branding stand point, London’s Olympics are not starting out well.

From a humor stand point, they are starting out great!

My advice for this logo or any others going forward can be summed up in two words: focus groups.

P.S. Here’s a link with some other more attractive logos (I especially liked the Paris logo…I think that would have been a huge hit, you know, had they…won the bid).

Tags: advertising, commentary, logo design, marketing, media, silliness // 3 Comments »

I try to avoid the “holiday-themed” blogs just cause they seem trite to me (people often mean well enough but…). This is a unique Memorial Day, however, for two reasons, the first of which is the United States is at war (though we also have standing at the ready military personnel all around the world even when we’re not involved at war, whom we should also not forgot).

The second reason this is a unique Memorial Day is because an international voice over effort was undertaken a few weeks ago to support our troops in the Middle East via the Armed Forces Network and their group of music radio stations in Baghdad, Balad, Mosul, Ali Base, Kirkuk, Sinjar and Tikrit.

Like many commercial radio stations in the U.S., Freedom Radio was planning to run a Memorial Day Countdown of the greatest rock songs of all time. Through his network of voice over friends (which is plentiful) voice talent and blogger extraordinaire Bob Souer was asked to lend his voice. Bob then asked Air Force Sergeant Chris Eder, who oversees these stations, if he needed other professional voiceover help to support the station’s announcers, providing, sweepers, bumpers and ID’s for the channel and its network. Maybe, they’d also wanted some voices to provide intros for songs on the countdown? Chris said sure but he’d asked for help like this before and usually if four people said they’d help, maybe one actually sent something. Chris had not yet heard of VO-BB.

Bob Souer posted the notice of what they needed on VO-BB and Chris nearly drowned is a sea of amazing voice talent who not only said they’d help but made fast work of providing great audio….lots of it! At last count 24 professional voice over talents from around the world, including yours truly cranked out everything Freedom Radio needed for a successful countdown, organizing ourselves as only former and current radio professionals can do…with fast, quality audio.

I fell back into my old production manager role from radio days gone by, voicing and producing some of my own stuff (which you heard in the second paragraph) and then producing for some other great voices including audio’connell female voice over talent D.B. and Kara, the aforementioned Bob Souerand a wonderful voice talent by the name of Diane Maggipinto.

My lesson that I took out of this experience (aside from getting to work with or be teamed with some terrific voice talents) is that my DJ talents, limited as they were even back in the day, have long since abandoned me. Fortunately for the soldiers, my contribution to this part of the project was fairly limited.

The donation of our collective time and talent was clearly something all the voices in the project wanted to do because it was the very least we could do to show our support to the men and women who leave the safety of their families and homes to follow orders around the world all the while putting themselves in harms way on our behalf. And such life and death stuff is never trite.

Our family’s thanks to all the men and women serving on our behalf all over the world (especially the two from our family). God bless you all and we hope you all come home soon and safe.

Tags: commentary, media, radio, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover // 14 Comments »

Congratulations to the Ottawa Senators who today won the NHL Eastern Conference versus the Buffalo Sabres. The Sabres were simply outplayed and outclassed at just about every position.

While my prediction for the series fell well short, I was heartened by the kind comment from Stephanie Ciccarelli of Voices.com:

Peter,

Stephanie

She showing the kind of sportsmanship playoff hockey is known for (ever see NFL lineup for a formal handshake between teams at the end of a match?)

Oh well, the hockey season starts in another 4 months!

Tags: commentary, silliness // Comments Off on the fat lady has sung for the sabres

Are you like me…do you hate when you open up a magazine to have 25 subscription postcards drop out? Or even worse when they DON”T fall out and make turning or staying on a page more difficult? It’s most annoying, I find, in magazine to which I already subscribe!

Well, blogs are different. While I’ve written about blog readers in the past, I’ve been wanting to improve and make easier the blog subscription process (so that when audio’connell’s voiceover blog on! has a new post, you’ll be notified you’ll see it in your reader or feed service and can read it when you like…really simple). RSS (Really Simple Syndication) can be secured through a variety of services…maybe “a ton of services” would better describe it. Being a good marketer, I want to be all things to all people so I needed to try and find a service or a plug in (if you don’t know, don’t ask) or something that would allow me to provide this great subscription service. “We write, you read!” I call “trademark” on that phrase!

Well anyway I have two options: first, a service called addthis.com and another service called Social Bookmarks plugin. Both pretty much do the same thing: allow people to subscribe or bookmark using their preferred service (which, as I mention, include a whole lot of choices).

The next question is: if they both pretty much do the same thing, which one do I choose to feature on the blog? Add This is featured under the “rss feeds” header in the upper left hand column of this page. And at the bottom of each post right now are the icons featured in the social book marketing plug in.

My first thought was having both would be subscription over kill (akin to the 25 subscription postcards falling from a magazine). But I now think it should be up to the consumers to decide (btw, if you’re reading this, YOU are the consumer….just wanted to clear that up). I do not expect a flood of voting but I do welcome your opinions.

And if your reading this sometime long after I’ve posted it and you can’t find one or the other of what I’ve just written about…you’ll either know how the vote turned out or that technology has changed again and we’re all subscribing via the computer chips the government has implanted in our ear lobes. Whether it’s the right ear lobe or the left ear lobe will determine the “tribe” you’ll be assigned to….stop freaking out, I made up that chip/ear lobe thing.

Tags: blogs, commentary, internet, marketing, media, technology // 1 Comment »