PH Audio Blog

A dispatch from the MD’s office | Can a product sell itself?

Posted by Grant on March 15, 2010 @ 3:03 pm
Categories: Audio Branding
Tags: Audio Branding, On-Hold Messaging, PH Audio, sound business

AUDIO PACKAGES

I’ve recently been spending time out in the field watching our Business Development Team sign up new clients – it’s truly fascinating, and I’m sure psychologists would have a field day in such an environment.

Watching how they interact, how they exchange information, and how our potential clients respond to their presentations, will never get boring. So with this post I’m sharing my personal observations, and questioning the notion: can a product really sell itself? Or indeed, are F2F meetings intrinsic to the sale and the building of successful supplier-client relationships?

Audio Copywriting | Part III: Tell It Straight – Words Your Audience Really Want to Hear

Posted by Amy on March 12, 2010 @ 1:19 pm
Categories: Copywriting
Tags: Advertising, Audio Branding, Copywriting, Copywriting tips, jargon, marketing, Music On Hold

You’ve heard it all before:

We need blue-sky thinking. I’m talking about pushing the envelope, going forward, let’s touch base soon.

Translation: corporate waffle that, in reality, could be said in half the words. Just another way to say, “We need big ideas, so give me a call”.

Anyone who watched Heston Blumenthal’s attempt to resurrect Little Chef last year will no doubt remember the chief executive’s constant wittering about ‘blue-sky thinking’. The phrase alone is irritating, but when used in the context of menus and motorway services, it simply became absurd. You can watch the evidence here.

Finished cringeing?

Well, in this post, we’re looking at why these kind of phrases have no place in external communications.

What a bunch of phonies…

Posted by Mariela on March 9, 2010 @ 5:50 pm
Categories: Fun & Games

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.

Breathless: producing the perfect voiceover

Posted by Mark on March 8, 2010 @ 3:35 pm
Categories: Audio Production
Tags: Audio Production, Audio Technology, Voiceover

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.

Getting the most from Web Audio

Posted by PH Audio on February 10, 2010 @ 4:08 pm
Categories: Web Audio
Tags: Audio Marketing, marketing, Web Audio

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.

On-Demand Messaging: have your say

Posted by PH Audio on February 2, 2010 @ 11:42 am
Categories: Music On Hold

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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The future of On-Hold Marketing

Posted by Matt on January 14, 2010 @ 3:43 pm
Categories: Audio Technology, Fun & Games
Tags: Audio Production, Audio Technology, futurism, on hold production, On-Hold Messaging

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.

BBC reporter and the unbreakable mobile phone

Posted by Mariela on January 12, 2010 @ 4:51 pm
Categories: Fun & Games

Don’t make promises you can’t keep…

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!

A new year, a new you!

Posted by Chrissy on January 8, 2010 @ 12:55 pm
Categories: On-Hold Messaging
Tags: Audio, marketing, Music On Hold, On-Hold Messaging

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.

Don’t leave your customers out in the cold

Posted by Chrissy on January 5, 2010 @ 1:43 pm
Categories: On-Hold Messaging
Tags: Audio Technology, messaging, snow

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?

On-hold marketing, audio branding and everything else between

PH Audio

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