Monday, November 16, 2009

Do you know how your clients feel?

A fascinating article touching on how humans make decisions came across my desk this morning. Research by Princeton psychology professor Danny Oppenheimer shows that decisions can be based on the ease of processing information – for example stock prices are higher shortly after the initial public offering when the ticker symbol is pronounceable (RAD for Rite-Aid compared with RDA for Reader’s Digest). In other work, Oppenheimer found that charitable giving rates varied according to what information was available about the charity’s efficiency rate (the percentage of donations that go to the actual cause versus what percentage goes to overhead). When people have a choice of giving to a charity with a lower efficiency rate, a higher efficiency rate, or no published rate, they will give to the charity with no published rate! Another of Oppenheimer’s studies shows that writing that uses a lot of big words detracts from the message. People will rate such writing as intelligent, but writing that uses simpler language is rated as more intelligent. You can read the article about Oppenheimer here.

These studies show that the decisions people make are based not simply on what they think, but also on how they feel while they’re thinking. It’s an important message for those of us who must market our business and we obviously need to design our marketing materials with this in mind. In fact with every appearance of our name/brand we should be thinking about how it might make our clients or potential clients feel. We want them to feel a certain way when they see us or hear us or think of us. How well are we succeeding in this? Can you examine your own materials and business practices and make an objective evaluation? Did you design your website with this in mind or did it just grow as your business grew? Did you hire someone to create a marketing campaign for you or did it just happen? In voice-over, probably most of us start out thinking we’re going to offer everything: audiobooks, e-learning, corporate narration, medical narration, message on hold, character voices, promo, radio imaging, the works. After a few years we find both that we excel in a certain genre and that specialisation is a key to success (at least in the U.S.). At that point we need to re-examine the way we’re presenting ourselves. Has this happened for you?

In today’s Actor’s Voice, Bonnie Gillespie writes about networking, and in conclusion she quotes from one of her own articles: People don’t remember you. They remember how they feel when they're around you. Think about it.

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Friday, May 23, 2008

Not getting that voice-over gig: You probably didn’t blow it.

You hear it all the time – do the audition and move on. If you keep track of all your auditions and how many days it has been since you did them and think necrotic thoughts like, “if I don’t hear by tomorrow then I’ll know I blew it” – you might find yourself with an ulcer.

Bonnie Gillespie wrote this week in both Actor’s Voice and Your Turn about the importance of not obsessing and about how you can be perfect for the role and still not get cast. And how it’s important to be process-oriented rather than results-oriented in this business in order to enjoy your life to the fullest and minimise stress. She tells the story of how she was hired to cast a film because of her relationship with her then-boyfriend, now husband, for whom the screenwriter had written a role in the film. After reading the script, Bonnie and her boyfriend agreed that he was not the best actor for that role! Examples like this are abundant in show business. It is even possible to get cast and end up not playing the role. Last weekend Bob Bergen told us the story of how Lily Tomlin was cast in the role of Edna Mode, the diminutive costume designer in The Incredibles. Brad Bird had a certain attitude in mind for that role and after attempting to get the read from Tomlin that he envisioned, Tomlin told Bird that he really should read the part himself, because he was perfect for it. And we all know how that turned out.





I’m waiting to hear the outcome of a number of recent auditions and submissions. Except that I’m not “waiting”. I’m working on the jobs I have right now, and continuing to work on my skills so that I’m prepared for whatever opportunities present themselves next. Not knowing what might come along is one of the most exciting things about my job as a voice actor. As Bonnie said in her column this week: “Staying prepared, focused, and available is all you really control.”

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Creating Your Own Voice-over Career

Among the things I love about a career in voice-over: the endless opportunities to create. But I think life offers opportunities to create no matter what you do. In my previous career as a biologist, I wrote a lot of papers based on rather dry data. When I wasn’t generating dry data and writing about them, I wrote papers that weren’t based on data at all. In a paper on homology and the ontological relationship of parts, I compared historical pathways in evolutionary biology to the transformation of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz from an all-flesh person to an all-tin person, or to the complete turnover of members in a baseball team that nevertheless does not change “the Yankees” into some other, separate historical entity. A paper on phylogenetic constraint was my favorite project ever, because it released me from the bonds of data and let me play with ideas to my heart’s content. Later, as a program director at the National Science Foundation, it was more challenging to find ways to have fun and create, but when I needed to give a presentation to discuss the history of funding in my program and the distribution of dollars across taxonomic groups, I made a huge “tree of life” that filled the conference room, with “apples” on the tree to represent grants awarded (it was quite effective, by the way, and paved the way for a major funding initiative at the foundation).

Tree of Life Project

Tree of Life project, National Science Foundation


And whenever a poster or flyer was needed, I volunteered. So the panelists we invited to help us make the final decisions about funding grant proposals found their way to the conference room with this:



Systematic Biology Panel poster




or this:

NSF Committee of Visitors poster



The point is, you can create your own opportunities for both work and fullfilment no matter what else is going on in your life. Whether your voice-over career is keeping you hopping, or whether you sometimes find yourself with down time, you can be creating something.

Casting director Bonnie Gillespie wrote yet another excellent article this week for The Actor's Voice called Back to Basics, covering the latest thinking on headshots, resumés, and the other tools of the actor’s trade. In it is a section entitled Put Yourself Out There – a call to action if you’re looking for ways to get yourself on the map. How do you get on the map? You put yourself there!! She writes about a talented actor-writer comedy team who produced their own short film, Girl's Night Out, to showcase their skills, which became a featured video on Youtube (thanks to additional legwork on the part of the creators – you don’t have to wait for that to happen either) and has led to some great opportunities for them. Bonnie is so right about the importance of creating your own work.

Ideas and opportunities come when you least expect them. A lot of the auditions and scripts I get are interesting, a lot are, well…. not. Last fall I got an audition script for Ariat boots that I really loved, and although I didn’t expect anything to come of this audition, I wanted to do something with it. I got my friend, voice-over talent & production wizard Ben Wilson to work on it with me and we came up with a piece we’re both very proud of. No, we didn’t get the gig (yes of course they were nuts not to hire us – thanks for mentioning it!) but we got a wonderful showpiece that we thoroughly enjoyed creating, and it has brought us other work. Sometimes I get nutty ideas for commercials. I know nobody is going to produce them, so I do it myself. Or I just stick stuff into projects I’ve been hired to do, just because. A long-standing client wrote me yesterday that he has left AuctionPal, the company he founded three years ago and for which he hired me to create the young and energetic, British-accented Piper as their spokesperson. AuctionPal is doing great, and he's still closely associated with them, but he needs new outlets for his own energy and creativity so he’s starting a new internet marketing company, Double Vision. He’s interested in hiring me to do the telephone answering system and wanted me to try out some voices, so this is what I sent him.

The next time you find work slowing down (not that you would ever admit to anybody that that happens – cuz that would be putting negative energy out there and it gets in your way and trips you), don’t wring your hands over it – do something about it! Send out more postcards, make more calls, write more emails, do more networking – but also, create something. Don’t know how to make Flash animations? Find a friend who does or take a class. Lack production skillz? Collaborate. Get busy. If people aren’t hiring, hire yourself to create a showpiece. It will keep you in tip-top creative shape, you’ll have a blast, and you never know where it might take you.

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