Where television and online advertising offer layers of stimulus – colour, sound, movement, logos – a telephone advert engages with fewer senses, but is no less complex.
In this post we’re looking at the impact of an on-brand audio voiceover; one that embodies your business and its beliefs perfectly. 
Having a bad day at work and tempted to tell callers exactly what’s on your mind? For many people, indulging in a spot of under-the-breath mumbling is enough to relieve tension, but for one school in Australia, their infuriation at pupil absences and lack of parental support was eloquently spat all over their answering machine. In fact, a whole auto attendant message was dedicated to making their feelings very clear!
At PH Audio we’re in the business of making music and voiceovers that fit a company’s image and brand. Sounding right for callers is critical and has lasting effects. I found an interesting piece of writing on ‘creative synaesthesia’ which brings me nicely onto this post: creatively, how does a company develop an on-hold marketing production or create an audio brand that fits with their branding?
Synaesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. For example, you might see colours when you hear a particular sound.
But ‘artificial synaesthesia’, as it’s coined in the article I’ve linked to above, can help businesses to understand how consumers perceive brands. By artificially recreating and understanding how people take meaning from a particular word or sound, it’s then easier to create the most effective combinations of voiceovers, content, style and music. Ultimately, you want to be able to positively reinforce brand values in the mind of the consumer.
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.
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.
PH Audio are (queue shameless plug) the on-hold marketing champions throughout Europe, so it goes without saying that we know what we’re doing when it comes to all things on hold.
That said, we do like our clients to be on the ball when choosing music and voiceovers that really represent their brands. And although our Audio Account Managers will make expert recommendations – nobody knows their business as well as the clients themselves.
It doesn’t feel like 13 years ago that we produced and installed our first production – time flies.
Quarter of a million productions later and every aspect of our service bears little resemblance to the processes I’d dug out of the ground back then. Voicing, music, installation, playback equipment and service levels are in a different stratosphere to those bygone days.
But that’s business for you – necessity is the mother – and these advances mean we’ve consistently evolved and improved. What was quite good then is quite brilliant today, which leads me nicely on to the aspect I think has changed the least noticeably but most significantly. That is: what the messages say or, as we say in the trade, the scripts.
It’s powerful, emotive and often controversial – music has a strange effect on us humans. Music on hold is unique in that it finds people when they’re not expecting it and can transport them (emotionally speaking) to another place.
The on hold music tracks below are the most popular choices among PH Audio clients in 2009.
They’re not listed in a particular order, because we want to know what you think – which is your favourite?
Tea for Two
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Ebb & Flow
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Cold as Ice
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Ocean Sunrise
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Rule the World
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Vote for your favourite track below right now and why not post a comment to tell us why you think it is the best track. If you feel that your on hold messaging could do with a fresh sound - contact PH Audio today!
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Last week we had a look at the benefits of brevity in effective hold music messages. This week, we’re looking at the role of grammar and punctuation in audio copywriting – and how a slip-up can change meaning in a big way.
When we write audio prompts, we’re writing to be read aloud. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the conventions of prose or the kind of grammar that turns PR fluff into a stonking, high-impact press release. That’s because, in many ways, a company’s successful on-hold messaging is built on the same blocks as a good story – if the grammar, punctuation and spelling is spot-on, you won’t even notice it. The caller won’t be distracted; your message won’t be lost.
That’s not to say you need to be perfect, of course. But not paying attention to grammar can change a lot, inadvertently loading a simple statement with innuendo… or worse. Get copywriting tips after the jump!
