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The Soccer Mom Myth

Career Advice, General

My friends Michele Miller and Holly Buchanan have co-written a new book that’s just been released, called The Soccer Mom Myth. Michele and Holly are two of the brightest and most insightful ladies I know. Whether you are a man or a woman, you’ll find a lot of valuable information in The Soccer Mom Myth.

(Yes, I this post doesn’t exactly have anything to do with voiceover work. But, think about it for a few minutes. Maybe less.)

Update: I neglected to thank Roy H. Williams and his Monday Morning Memo for March 10, 2008 for alerting me to the release of Michele and Holly’s book. Thank you, Roy. Painful or pleasant, I always look forward to reading your pieces each Monday.

Plant the seeds

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover

When it comes to your voiceover career, of for that matter any freelance career, we’re all farmers. Growing up, I lived in the farm country of Central Minnesota. Every spring, along with lots of other things, we always planted the seeds. If we didn’t plant the seeds in the spring, we would have had no business looking for crops to harvest in the autumn. Which seeds you sow, and in what fields you sow them, is up to you.

Tracy Pattin’s blog post about an opportunity that didn’t result exactly the way she hoped, but which was still a seed planted, was the germ that lead to this post.
You see, when we plant the seeds, some of them bear fruit very quickly. Others take a while and some incubate for just about forever. You don’t know which is which, in fact you can’t tell. So, you can’t worry about what the outcome will be from a specific seed that you’re planting. Just like Tracy took the risk to ask for that interview, the immediate outcome isn’t the focus, taking the risk. It’s planting the seed. And just like the farmer, if you plant the seeds, you will get a harvest. Some years will be bumper crops. Some years will be pretty meager. But, ever year you’ll have a harvest. And of course, for us in the voiceover business, we don’t have to wait until Spring to plant or Autumn to harvest. We can plant and harvest any time of year. Not to mention, voiceover work is much easier than working for a living.

A new site from an old friend

General, People

While I’m in Nashville for a few days on a business trip (to the National Religious Broadcasters convention) I ran in to one of my very dear friends who has been an inspiration to me for many years. He let me know that he’s just launched a new website, which I want to pass along to you. His name is Wayne Shepherd. He’s also started a blog, by the way, so I’ve added both of these links to my blogroll today.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Wayne. I hope you know I mean that “old friend” comment in the nicest possible way!

Charlie Supercat

General, People

My good friend Charlie Glaize emails this evening that one of his new voiceover projects is being unveiled at a trade show next week, but the video is already available on YouTube.

Charlie is the campy announcer. Good work, Charlie.

VOICE 2008 update

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover, People

More and more information is coming from the VOICE 2008 conference. Here is some information about the General Session presenters.

Friday Morning Keynote Speaker is Susan Berkley.
Susan Berkley is a top voice-over artist whose voice has sold millions of dollars worth of products and services on TV and radio commercials. She is the telephone voice of many Fortune 100 companies. Susan is CEO of Berkley Productions, Inc., a company that provides voice mastery training for aspiring voice artists, and well as performance coaching for business and sales professionals. She is the author of Speak to Influence – How to Unlock the Hidden Power of Your Voice. Visit www.greatvoice.com to learn more about this dynamic lady! Susan is a master marketer and a darn good voice coach!!

Keynote Speaker on Monday Morning is Pat Fraley.
Winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Voicey Awards in 2008, Patrick Fraley has created voices for more than 4,000 characters, placing him among the top ten performers of all time to be cast in animation. Pat teaches 700+ students a year in events, workshops, and seminars on various aspects of voiceover. His unique character voice curriculum is the only one accredited at the university level. He has taught voice for 35 years, is a member of the Voice and Speech Trainers of American and holds a Master’s of Fine Arts degree in Professional Acting from Cornell University.

Pat Fraley is the “Voiceover King” of working outside the box! During his special guest appearance at VOICE 2008, he will reveal his “Secret Dialect System” created for voiceover. You’ll be amazed at how Pat’s dialect secrets will change the way you work with your characters! All that and even more. . . Pat is one of the nicest people we know!
Learn more at www.patfraleyteaches.com

Keynote Speaker on Sunday is Marc Cashman.
Marc Cashman is one of the few voice-acting instructors in the U.S. who is on “both sides of the glass” as a Clio-winning Radio and TV commercial copywriter, producer, and casting director, and as a working voice actor. As a voice actor, he has been heard locally, regionally, nationally and internationally on radio, TV, film, documentaries, radio plays, video games and audio books. Marc has voiced thousands of commercials, dubbed foreign films, narrated dozens of audio books, and created the voices of many CD-Rom, online and video game characters. Oh, and did we mention. . . he’s a really funny guy! Find out why at www.cashmancommercials.com.

VOICE 2008 will be August 8th through the 11th, 2008 in Los Angeles. I hope I see you there.

Appearance and Substance

General

My friend from just down the road a piece, Lance Blair (he lives and works in Atlanta) blogs about voiceover. It’s been a while since I visited his blog, so it was only today that I noticed this excellent post pointing out one of the keys to great voiceover work: stay focused on the meaning of the message you’re reading.

Learning opportunities with Marc Cashman

General

Marc Cashman emails with news of some voiceover training classes he’ll be leading. Here are the details as he sent them to me.

Beginners – Saturdays, March 29th – May 3rd 10AM-1PM
Intermediate – Mondays, March 31st – May 5th 7PM-10PM
Advanced – Wednesdays, April 2nd – May 7th 7PM-10PM
Master Class – Saturday, March 22nd, from 10AM to 5PM

For registration details get in touch with Marc Cashman.

Ben Lepley’s VGA Dreams, Episode 1

General, People

One of the things I really like about the various connections I’ve made since I started blogging about voiceover is the way those connections lead to other connections. Here’s an example.

Some Audio Guy’s blog is one I discovered some weeks ago and added to my blogroll. He’s stopped by to leave comments now and then, all of which are appreciated. And as I do with all of the blogs I link, I check out his blog from time to time. So, over this past weekend, he posted a video from one of his friends, Ben Lepley. I enjoyed it so much that I asked if he and Ben would mind if I posted it here, too. They were nice enough to say, yes.

According to Some Audio Guy’s post, Ben does all the voices and all the animation. Nice work, Ben. Really nice.

While we’re thinking about self-evaluation…

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover, People

My friend Dan Nachtrab emails in response to my post about Connie Terwilliger’s Self-Evaluation course. He sent me a link to a very interesting article that, at least on the surface, doesn’t seem to have much to do with voiceover work. But, think about these points…

* framing (how you present data is as important as the data itself)
* impact bias (overestimation of possible outcomes),
* confirmation bias (recognising only data that supports your hypothesis)
* loss aversion (we stand to gain more than we would lose, but our fear of loss prevents us)
* selective perception (seeing what you want to see),and
* rosy retrospection (integral to the repeated experience of family Christmas)

Mighty interesting stuff. Thank you for the link, Dan.

The wrong questions find the wrong answers

Career Advice, General, People

My friend Blaine Parker isn’t just a brilliant voice actor (listen to his demos and you’ll see what I mean), but he’s also a superb writer. He publishes a weekly email missive called Hot Points and reading it is one of the highlights of each Monday for me. Below is the text of Blaine’s release today.
—————————————————————————-
HOT POINTS for The Week for March 3, 2008

WE SOLVE CUSTOMER PROBLEMS, NOT CREATE THEM

The number of times we hear it is staggering.

“We ask everyone who calls how they heard about us.” Makes me want to stamp my feet and scream like a little girl whilst yanking out my hair.

Well, maybe not.

But close.

Our problem: how to attract customers to our clients’ businesses. Our clients’ problem: how to service those customers. It is not our clients’ customers’ problem to provide lead sourcing. To expect customers to do so is rude and intrusive. It’s also a fabulous way for an advertiser to destroy effective marketing.

CUSTOMERS KNOW ONLY ONE THING.

They know what they want. They have a problem to be solved. They want the advertiser to solve it. They do not know, most of the time, how they heard about the advertiser’s business.
Guaranteed.

They might know they heard a radio commercial. They probably don’t know where they heard it. But if the advertiser has any presence in the marketplace, the customer has probably heard the radio commercial.

Many times.

Seen the billboard.

Many times.

Seen the newspaper ad.

Many times.

Seen the company’s trucks.

Many times.

Any business worth its salt has a media mix, with advertising all over town. They’ve been invading the customer’s conscience routinely, possibly for years. If the advertiser has been advertising with any persistence, the customer shouldn’t know how he heard about the business. The customer should simply know in his heart that this business is the one for him.

MOREOVER, THE ADVERTISER SHOULD KNOW IN HIS HEART WHEN THE ADVERTISING IS WORKING.

You can just tell. If new advertising is running, and the phone starts ringing or customers start coming in, guess what. The advertising works. It doesn’t matter what the customers say. I’ve had 50% of customers generated by one of my ads claim they heard it on a station where it never ran. I’ve had advertisers claim they were experiencing zero lead conversion—which we knew was untrue, because one of our own people was a customer, and was meeting other customers generated by our advertising.

As an website customer, I’ve repeatedly been asked to source the lead. And as an ad guy, I want to be helpful. But most of the time, the websites (a) don’t have all the sourcing options available, or (b) don’t let me tell them ALL the places I heard about them.

I’ve had client businesses where the salespeople simply make up their own answers to the lead sourcing questions.

How do we know this?

Because the leads were geographically impossible. You simply can’t be getting 75% of your leads from KXYZ when every one of those callers lives in an area code 100 miles south of KXYZ’s listening area.

“THAT’S CRAZY. I NEVER ASK MY CLIENTS IF THE RADIO COMMERCIALS ARE WORKING.”

I actually had a new radio account rep say this to me last Friday.

We were talking about whether one of his client’s was having success. He had a vague idea that everything was going well. I said to him, “You’re not asking them how the commercials are doing, are you?”

That’s when he told me that was a crazy question.

“I’ll hear from them if it’s NOT working. And they’ll buy more time if it IS working. But I never ask them if our commercials are doing the job.”
I thanked him profusely.

Just like a business will know if their advertising is effective, an account rep can tell if his client is happy—all without sticking a needle in him that says, “Hey, how are WE doing for you?”

All that does is plant a seed of doubt in the client’s mind.

And once the seed of doubt is planted, it gets to germinate and sprout a big, leafy tree full of questions.

OURS IS A BUSINESS OF FAITH.

We have to have faith in our media and our creative product. Our clients have to have share our faith. And we don’t do anything to reinforce their faith by letting them endlessly question us and their customers.

Yes, inquiry has its place.

But the questions need to be smart.

And so does the evaluation process.

And the only way that shows up is in the numbers.

Are the ads running? Is business up?

The ads are working. Pure and simple. But under those exact circumstances, guess what happens when an advertiser has no faith and starts interrogating customers?

The advertising fails.

Because the answers will never be the ones an insecure advertiser wants to hear.

As always,
Blaine Parker
Your Short, Fat Creative Director in
Los Angeles
——————————————————————-
If you’d like to start getting Blaine’s Hot Points each Monday, click through to his website, send him and email and ask him to add you to his distribution list. And thank you, Blaine for permission to publish this tasty treat today.

Pat Fraley has really done it this time

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover, People

My friend Pat Fraley, one of the finest voiceover talents extant, is not only brilliant at doing voiceovers; he’s brilliant at teaching voiceover as well. Normally it costs a pretty hefty chunk of change to study with Pat, but he emails today to say “check out this page on my website.” So, I do. And what’s there? A series of free voiceover lessons. Yes, free.

Were I you, I’d visit soon. One of these days Pat may come to his senses and take the page down.

A true delight

General, People

A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Dave Hoffmann at one of the International Radio Creative and Production Summit meetings that Dan O’Day hosts in Los Angeles. A few times since then Dave has hired me through his production company, Audio Architects. Today I got a chance to work with Dave again, which reminded me what a terrifically nice guy he is. Whether you hire him to voice or produce, if you work with Dave Hoffmann and Audio Architects, I’m quite sure you’ll have a great experience, too.