For the managers at Carlisle’s Department of Work and Pensions, the best way to cope with the additional workload caused by yesterday’s Civil Servants’ strike was to instruct the remaining staff to impersonate answering machines. It must have seemed like such a good idea at the time. 
Mark Griffiths, one of PH Audio’s dedicated Sound Producers, offers his take on a small but critical element of voiceover editing.
My job is to take people’s breath away.
I edit voiceovers for a living. One of the main tasks is to remove all the breathing sounds.
Voiceover artists’ voices get compressed in the final mix. This has the effect of making all the quiet parts of speech louder. It’s one of the studio techniques that gives that extra oomph to the voices of radio announcers and pop singers.
But if you compress a voice track with the breaths left in, the breaths are amplified. These noises, which are normally so quiet we don’t notice them in normal speech, are boosted to the same volume as the words.
It makes the speaker sound like the Elephant Man.
So I get rid of them.
We’ve spoken before about the ways web audio adds more to your website.
For the most part, web audio works as a promotional tool; grabbing attention and anchoring the user’s interest. You might use it to introduce your business. You might use it to highlight your main products or services in a short burst of information; a summary of what you’re about. You might even use it as another way to say hello.
But more than an effective promotional tool, web audio can be functional, too – a way to direct your visitors to pages and, in turn, to the offers you really want them to see.
At PH Audio, we’re always looking at ways we can improve our service. Product innovation is a big part of that drive, and we’re developing technology that will ultimately make On-Hold Marketing simpler and better to use. As our client, we see your feedback as a big part of that process.
Existing productions are compiled as a single wave file, which can sometimes mean they’re quite inflexible. We want to change that, and give you the ability and the tools to swap and remove individual prompts whenever you’d like to – the On-Hold Marketing you know but on demand.
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It’s 2010, which means it’s officially The Future. We’re all using jetpacks to get to work, using teleporters to go on city breaks, talking to family with our watches, that kind of thing.
Well, sort of. Google and Apple taking over the world besides, we’re not quite as advanced as our forefathers imagined. It’s easy to laugh at old science fiction stories, movies and games now we’re here, but some of them really did think we’d be in flying cars by now. Even Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most nerdy celebrated science fiction writers in the world, thought we’d be playing with gas monsters on Jupiter by next year.
So, in the spirit of predicting the future (and because it’s trendy to talk about the next decade), we thought we’d gather ideas about the way On-Hold Marketing might change and develop. Click ‘read more’ to see what we came up with.
If the people behind Sonim’s unbreakable mobile phone haven’t heard that retrospective wisdom enough already, by the end of today they certainly will. When the BBC’s Dan Simmons took up the challenge to break the unbreakable at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the phone’s impressive display of resilience didn’t last long. Cue red faces all round and a good dose of British apologising, but what can we learn from this incident?
Big claims might attract plenty of publicity, but if your business can’t live up to them, that exposure can quickly turn on you. So, only offer the moon on a stick if you’ve actually got a lunar lolly up your sleeve, or make sure someone’s recording it and then broadcast it for the world’s amusement!
The New Year is a time for change, a time when we revaluate who we are and what we do. But wait — before you think, ‘Here we go, more spiel about how we should go on a diet or give up smoking’, we’re actually talking about how making small changes to the way you approach marketing could really help your business flourish in 2010.
So far 2010 doesn’t seem very welcoming, does it? You don’t need us to tell you that Britain is facing one of the worst winters in 100 years. Schools are closed, roads are shut and transport is disrupted – you might even be one of the three million workers who have been unable to make it into work. But how can businesses prepare?
While the UK’s press occupies itself with icy roads, epic snowmen and Eurostar’s winter engineering problems, weather over in the States has thrown up its own challenges for another large travel company this weekend.
Delta Air Lines – who’ve had to cancel a large number of flights owing to bad weather in the wake of the massive Eastcoast snow storm – have apparently misjudged their callers’ taste in on-hold music.
According to accounts from many angry Twitter users, stranded travellers and would-be passengers are calling the airline only to hear Let It Snow on a loop.
We reckon they’d have been better recording some comfort messages directing callers to helpful pages on their website…
…But we’re sure they probably know that by now.
We’re a patient bunch, us Brits. Along with fax machines, umbrellas and radar, we invented queuing.
We queue at Alton Towers. Queue at the post office. Queue for pints. Queue for burgers after too many pints. We’d queue for sleeping if somebody said it was the right and proper thing to do.
Waiting politely is a nationwide sport. To the rest of the world, we’re a country of hooligans, stag-doers, beer-drinkers and queue-ers. To rest of the world, we’re either battering each other, voicing baddies in Bond films, or standing quietly in a line.
But, according to new research by TalkTalk, there’s a problem with that stereotype.
As a country, we’re fast losing patience.