Competition for Michael Douglas at NBC Nightly News?

Remember when all the hoopla concerning Michael Douglas announcing at NBC was flying fast and furiously?

President of audio’connell voice talent, Peter K. O’Connell, rather offended by NBC’s new announcer selection, decided that instead of simply being someone who pointed out a fly in the soup, he’d be a person who would also take action and do something constructive and creative about the situation.

An unofficial NBC Nightly News contest challenging professional voice actors to strut their stuff as possible replacements for Michael Douglas took on a life of its own over the Christmas holiday season, resulting in more than 60 entrants and over 154 votes each consisting of the voters preference for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place finishers.

On January 13th, 2008, the winners were announced via the Voxmarketising podcast.

The official winners of the unofficial NBC Nightly News Announcing contest are:

1st Place: David Houston
2nd Place: Bruce Miles
3rd Place: Connie Terwilliger

To listen to their demo submissions, click here and play the Voxmarketising Podcast at audioconnell.com.

Source: VOX Daily

The Future of Voice Acting Now

Aspiring voice actors aren’t just working day jobs in radio, television or at telemarketing firms… they’re in the high school broadcasting communications classes and take part in co-operative learning opportunities to gain practical, hands-on experience working in the field that will shape their future careers.

Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices.com had the great pleasure of sitting in on one such class taught by a seasoned broadcaster, Brent Bissell, teacher at Clarke Road Secondary School in London, Ontario Canada, watching the high school’s daily broadcast and spending time with the students to take their voice acting questions as well as chat with them about their goals following graduation, a reality that is right around the corner.

“I’d never been so ‘behind the scenes’ before and it was intriguing to see how the green screens worked when graphics were added to give the appearance of a professional network studio during the televised broadcast. I also got to watch the students, who were all responsible for different things, operate the teleprompter, cameras, and even be news anchors behind the desk.”

Technology being used in the classroom included an assortment of editing tools such as Adobe Audition for audio, a Shure microphone modeled in the 50s style, a dynamic microphone for the radio announcer, linear and non-linear editing capabilities, and a Shure 819 boundary microphone used to pick up the voices of the news anchors during the Clarke Road televised daily broadcast which was flat upon the table and picked up the presenters voices effortlessly.

Source: VOX Daily

Voice Acting Workshops in Exotic Locales

Voice acting workshops, at one point not so long ago, were confined to a local recording studio or hotel conference center.

Within the past several years many voice acting coaches have been offering a different sort of experience wherein the actual workshop participation is just one aspect of the package.

Some of these events now include social activities and travel to studios nestled in the mountains of Utah by the lake shore, a stone’s throw from a beach on the coast of Hawaii and even on cruise lines sailing up the Pacific coastline.

The trend of late has been to offer workshops that present a working vacation for those in attendance. By mixing business with pleasure, and the occasional exotic location, participants are treated to experiences that are educational, social and relaxing - training opportunities that can also be written off as business expenses related to professional development.

A voice over workshop, for those who haven’t attended one, is an opportunity to learn a new skill, technique, or side of the voice acting business that is usually offered over a weekend by instructors of voice over.

Source: VOX Daily

Podcasting Needs a Standard Set of Metrics to Attract Advertisers

 

The recent news of Wizzard Media hitting the 1 billion download mark has spurred on larger discussion around the viability of advertising in podcasts.

A Community Platform

I have and still hold to my belief that podcasting not merely a delivery mechanism for audio and video content, but a platform for building communities.

As any content publisher knows, advertisers are naturally attracted to large, targeted audiences.

iTunes Converts Big Media into Podcasters

In 2007, we witnessed the iTunes podcasting directory be taken over with mainstream media outlets, creating fresh content and packaged as a podcast, and not simply repackaging existing radio or television broadcasts. A good example of this is BusinessWeek’s look inside and behind the issues cover story, and a personal favorite of mine.

Clearly with the audience is there.

Furthermore, podcast producers have the good fortune of building communities in what venture capitalists would call “vertical markets”.

Ad Creation

Online marketplaces, such as Voices.com, provide a venue where advertisers can search for, audition and hire the ideal sounding voice for their ad. Posting a job is by far the fastest way to get audio samples and prices, and an escrow service will take away any concern over hiring someone you haven’t worked with before. So what’s missing?

Podcast Advertising Metrics

Just as web advertising has standard metrics such as CPM (Cost Per Thousand) for display or graphical banner ads and PPC (Pay Per Click) for contextual ads typically found on the sidebar of your favorite search engines, podcasting needs to find a model that works.

PPP (Pay Per Play)
Advertisers will pay to play a 15-30 sec audio ad embedded within a podcast episode. The listener does not have to click on anything for the publisher to get paid, which is what makes it different to other forms of advertising. Podcasters get paid for 100% of your visitors and the ads are contextual and will be related to the podcast’s content and niche.

Return On Investment

Smart advertisers will make use of website metric software such as Google Analytics and create goals to measure the performance of their podcast advertising campaigns.

For businesses that run on Salesforce.com, you could easily create a “campaign” to measure and manage the number of new leads and sales opportunities from the podcast ads.

So regardless of how you decide to engage in podcasting, the tools are there for podcasters to create great content, for online marketplaces to build a network of ad producers and for the advertiser to measure the return on investment.

Now, It’s a Matter of Leadership

Who is going to lead the industry forward and determine a set of metrics to help new advertisers measure their success in podcasting?

Voice Mashups, The Evolution of the Data Mashup

Voice Mashups are making ground as both developers and business are seeing the opportunity to incorporate pre-recorded voice messages into web applications.

Voice Mashups Defined

Briefly, a mashup is define as a lightweight application that takes data from more than more than one source and puts the data together in an interesting way.

Voice mashups involves a combination involves multiple data sources, triggers, events, and even multiple applications that aren’t hosted by the same service provide and utilize pre-recorded voice to communicate a message.

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Has Video Killed Old Television Habits?

 

Making headlines today is Nielsen Online, the Internet measurement firm, reported some online video sites have doubled their audience since the strike began at the end of October.The study finds that the audience to sites such as YouTube has nearly doubled in the last year.

Video Sharing Websites Take the Lead

According to Pew Internet

• Nearly half (48%) of US net users visited a video sharing site during 2007.

• On a typical day, some 15% were either watching or posting video.

User Generated Videos Still Going Strong

• Some 54% of American adults now have a high-speed connection at home, compared to 45% at the same time last year.

• According to the Pew Internet Project, men are slightly more likely to use a video-sharing site than women - 53% compared to 43%.

• The younger audience is driving the increase with 70% of people under 30 using such sites.

With some 22% of Americans now shoot their own videos, with 14% of them posting at least some of that video online, how long will it be before we see those numbers increase?

Television Network Video Sites Get Traction

The BBC points out that “the on-going writers’ strike has meant that many popular programs are currently off-air in the US and, according to Nielsen Online, this has seen Americans turn in large numbers to online alternatives. ”

Voices.com’s V.P. of Marketing gave a favorable review of Hulu in her post entitled “Hulu.com Serves as TV Fix During the Writers Strike”.

Mrs. Ciccarelli poses the question “What’s your television viewing schedule been like since November 5th, 2007?”

If that date sounds vaguely familiar, it is the day that the Writers Guild of America first went on strike stopping production in its tracks as actors in support of the writers refused to cross picket lines and pop culture as we knew it began to rely solely upon news programs, reality TV and reruns.

Have you explored any alternatives and enjoyed online video during the writers strike?

Wizzard Media Hits 1 Billion Podcast Downloads

As a positive sign that Wizzard Media is doing things right, they’ve just reported that they’ve recorded an unprecedented one billion podcast download requests in 2007, a milestone for Wizzard Media, its podcasting clients and the entire podcasting industry.

Podcast Hosting Services

Wizzard Media, comprised of premier podcast-hosting services Libsyn, Switchpod and Blast Podcast, received an average of 2.75 million requests for podcast episodes per day in 2007, a nearly 300% increase over the daily average in 2006.

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5 Tactics for Getting a Job at a Local Radio Station

Thinking locally, that is the radio stations in your hometown, will serve you best when trying to break into the market as an imaging voice, a promo voice, or commercial voice for broadcast radio.

While you’re thinking locally, think traditionally as well. Most stations still require a hard copy of your resume and a demo CD of your work to keep on file.

Address your package to the producer, program director or general manager. This may take some researching to locate the appropriate directors contact details, but you definitely want your package getting into the hands of the right person at the station, lest it get lost or thrown out.

As with any traditional job application, you will need to:

• Write a cover letter and resume introducing your services
• Follow up to confirm receipt of your resume
• Ask if you can send your demo CD for consideration
• Mail a package including a CD sampler of your radio work / demos
• Follow up again to gain feedback

When approaching a station that you haven’t worked for before, you will need to be diligent and professional to catch their eyes and especially their ears. One of the greatest assets you can instantly provide to a station is fresh talent.

Stations, though they do work with some talent on a regular basis inhouse or on retainers, are always on the lookout for new voice talent to help set them apart.

Highlight how you and your voice can make a difference, for example, your proven ability to reach their target audience. It’s all about the station, not about you.

If you remind yourself of that when applying for work, the responses from stations will be more favorable than not.

Good luck!

Yahoo’s New Browser-Based MP3 Player

Yahoo recently announced a new free browser-based MP3 player that you can embed in your any web page.

To use the Yahoo MP3 player, you’ll need to:

• Add links to MP3s in your web page. These can be anywhere on the web.
• Add a line of code to insert Yahoo’s Javascript library.
• Refresh your page and see the player buttons appear on your web page

You may be thinking this is a great idea, however one must be cautious when working with their precious audio productions. This sentiment was felt by the +30 people who left comments at TechCrunch.

Why You Should Think Twice Before Adding the Yahoo MP3 Player

Podcasting News gives three valid reasons why webmasters, podcasters and voice talent should avoid the Yahoo MP3 Player:

• First of all, Yahoo’s player duplicates the functionality of a lot of existing Flash-based MP3 players. If you’ve got MP3s to share, there are free plugins for the popular blogging platforms that embed players into your pages.

• You don’t want to outsource control of your site’s look or functionality to a third party. If you put a middle man between your content and your audience, they can change the features, introduce advertising and even hijack your content at any time. It’s happened before.

• You especially don’t want to rely on Yahoo for this. Remember how Yahoo unceremoniously killed their podcast portal last year? They could drop support for this MP3 player at any time, which would break every page that you used their player on.

Given Yahoo’s history of trying out new ideas and be willing to pull the plug with little notice to their users, I’d recommend staying away from the Yahoo MP3 player, particularly if your business depends on having a reliable, ad-free MP3 player.

The Hobbit Movie Voice Cast Speculation

The two-billion dollar, two picture prequel based on an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s book “The Hobbit” rumor mill has started to churn, with speculations about the voice actors (and on-camera actors) popping up, including names of returning voice actors as well as voice acting candidates for roles that have not yet been assigned.

It goes without saying that Andy Serkis (Gollum) will reprise his role as well as on-camera actor Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey, but other character roles are up in the air, including that of the Smaug the Dragon, with high profile names being bandied around the likes of Jeremy Irons.

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