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The Secret That Really Pops Podcast Intros

By Stephanie Ciccarelli in Featured

When the typical podcast intro just didn’t cut it anymore, some podcasters have taken a swing in a different direction, creating characters that embodied real feelings, interests and desires.

Recently, I was listening to the CBC Radio One program O’Reilly and the Age of Persuasion. Terry, known for his insight into how marketing and advertising have forever permeated our lives, is an expert in the field and well worth listening to on a Saturday afternoon.

What I have written below is my interpretation of Terry’s broadcast last weekend.

When the traditional broadcast announcer just didn’t cut it anymore, advertising companies took a swing in a different direction, creating characters that embodied real feelings, interests and desires.

The late 1950s and early 60s marked the end of one-way advertisements that ceased to boost a company’s ROI. This decade also brought a host of changes to the way that advertisers started communicating with their audiences.

After a while, no one could relate to the stand-offish announcer, perched on his chair, wearing a tweed suit, and a hand cupped over one ear.

Announcers, who had broken through the proverbial “Fourth Wall” in before, were not performing their function as they had in the past; they were not ‘getting through’ to the public any more.

You wouldn’t envision announcer man coming to your neighborhood BBQ or taking their child to a movie. Announcers were not real in a sense and appeared to be cold, disconnected and impersonal.

Insert David Ogilvy

This is why advertising geniuses, for example, David Ogilvy, started making advertising more of a personal medium, introducing characters such as Mrs. Olson (Folger’s Coffee), Aunt Jemima (Maple syrup and pancakes), Charlie the Tuna (StarKist Tuna), and Madge the Manicurist (Colgate-Palmolive).

For example, Mrs. Olson of Folger’s fame was very effective:

The TV spokeswoman for Folger’s Coffee, made by Procter & Gamble. Introduced in 1963, Mrs. Olson (the late Virginia Christine), was a Swedish woman who seemed to know all the young couples in town whose husband’s never asked for a second cup of coffee. Of course, that was her cue to sell them on the idea of Folger’s Coffee whose catchphrases were “Mountain Grown.” and “It’s the richest kind.” The commercials ended in 1985.

And of course, who could forget the ever-striving Charlie the Tuna who was just never good enough to be put into a can of StarKist Tuna… How about Tony the Tiger and those Frosted Flakes?

What advertisers realized was that people sell products. Whether on camera or through voice-over, personalities sell.

These characters were relevant, interesting, and often faced with the same challenges of the average person who was listening or viewing the ad.

Now, just how do you achieve the same extraordinary results with a voice actor as with an on-camera actor?

Simple.

Be sure that whoever you hire to voice your commercial has a voice that embodies the brand you are promoting.

The Power of the Human Voice

Getting a great voice actor on the job does more for you than just get a script read. The voice actor brings that script to life and is a living testament to the brand, using their voice to convey all of the brand qualities and attributes so that the script doesn’t have to, saving the copy writer time and making the ad appear more natural, thus, more persuasive.

There is nothing more persuasive than the human voice. There is something innate, primitive and personal about how one human being can affect another. This is why advertising with a person selling a product is far more effective than an announcer or text ad.

Voices can be warm, funny, insightful, authentic, trustworthy, taste, grace, strength, empathy, sincerity, interest, confidence, and so on.

Sometimes, an advertisement featuring a personality can become even more effective, particularly if the character or voice actor promoting the product is a celebrity or has celebrity status.

One of the most memorable and humorous examples Terry used was of Eugene Levy’s commercial for the Gershwin musical Crazy For You.

By renaming his daughters Ira and George, hearing only from his wife through lawyers, and losing himself completely in the whole Crazy for You lifestyle, Eugene’s performance conveyed that seeing the Gershwin musical would change your life or have a significant impact. His character, Norman, who had changed his name to Norman Gershwin, made all of this clear through the recanting of the incredible lengths he had gone to just because he was crazy for Crazy for You.

If that didn’t draw in mammoth sales, I don’t know what else could have done better.

Eugene Levy’s endorsement along with this performance as the newly christened Norman Gershwin was over the top, funny, and whimsical, the perfect combination for the theatre company to draw a crowd, regardless of if the show was playing on Broadway or at the local community theatre.

Stephanie Ciccarelli is the Vice President of Marketing and co-founder of Voices.com, the voice over marketplace. A vocal major and graduate from the Don Wright Faculty of Music at the University of Western Ontario, Stephanie is able to translate years of classical music training, theory and performance into practical applications within the voice over industry. Specializing in public relation and copy writing, her presence and persona embody the Voices.com brand through partner sites like PodcastingVoiceTalent.com.

Video Insider: Marketers Are From Mars, Viewers Are From Venus: Three Keys To a Satisfying (Online Video Advertising) Relationship

By Mike in Featured

DURING A COCKTAIL PARTY A few weeks ago, a newly single friend of mine gulped down his third Scotch, slammed down his glass and announced, “Okay, I give up. What the heck do women want? I used to think I understood them, but these days, I’m completely stumped.”

Being the supportive friend that I am, I offered him a few words of wisdom (”Beats me, but let me know when you find out”) handed him another drink and promptly changed the subject. But later that night as my thoughts turned to work, I remembered his words and realized that the business of marketing in an online video environment is going through a similar life stage. As marketers, we are starting to get to know online video viewers — what they want and how they want to be treated. Sometimes we connect well and other times we find ourselves, well, stumped.

Here are three rules of the relationship I think marketers should keep in mind to ensure that their video advertising efforts win the hearts of consumers:

1) Length matters. It’s no secret that the 30-second pre-roll is both reviled and at the same time delivers more in-video weight than any other ad unit. But just how much do viewers dislike their length? At Veoh, we’ve found that viewers are 40% more likely to abandon the video experience during a 30-second pre-roll ad than a 15-second pre-roll ad. And contrary to popular opinion, we’ve found that viewers are just as turned off by 30-second pre-rolls before long-form video as they are by pre-rolls before short clips. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a 3-minute clip or a 30-minute episode: viewers have narrowed their windows of ad acceptance.

As a marketer, it’s best not to let your viewers walk out the door before you’ve finished your best pick-up line. Make the extra creative investment and showcase your charm in a 15-second (or shorter) introduction.

2) Your best prospects are already engaged. When choosing video sites for your media buy, it’s important to make sure the site partners have highly loyal and engaged audiences. Why? Because viewers who are not yet familiar with or engaged in a site are much less accepting of ads during their viewing experience. We found that heavy video viewers (viewers who visit the site and watch a video at least six times per month) are 50% more likely to continue watching a video after a pre-roll than are light and new viewers. In addition, heavy viewers are more than 10 times more likely than light or new viewers to accept a pre-roll ad within the first video they watch in a session without abandoning the experience.

So in an online video environment, if the majority of the viewers are already “taken,” you’ll actually have a much better chance of making a strong connection.

3) It’s always better with an audience. Yes, network TV shows are great, but the only way to take full advantage of Web video is by targeting audiences rather than following a traditional TV model of buying around content. The same valuable viewers who watch full-length network sitcoms are also watching independent studio productions and popular video clips - so why not reach them throughout their entire viewing experience? In addition to increasing the number of opportunities for marketers to reach consumers, ads that target audiences based on their behaviors and interests are much more relevant to and therefore well-received by online video viewers.

For example, during a recent national family restaurant campaign, we saw that ads that were behaviorally targeted to the family-focused audience performed 20 times better than basic contextually targeted companion ads - and yielded a higher number of impressions than they would have received if targeting a single show. Make sure to work with your video site partners to identify viewer behavior segments that fit with your brand’s target audience - it’s the best way to start a positive conversation with a video viewer (and much cheaper than buying them a cocktail).

In any budding relationship, it’s very easy to overlook the basics when you’re trying to make a good impression. As marketers, if we listen to what our viewers want and pay more attention to their unique interests, we can build more exciting and lasting relationships in online video environments.

Mike Henry is senior vice president of advertising sales at Veoh Networks, a leading Internet television company with more than 28 million unique monthly viewers worldwide and over 100,000 content publishers including CBS, ViacomÂ’s MTV Networks, ABC, Warner Bros. Television Group, ESPN and Lions Gate, as well as thousands of independent filmmakers and content producers. 

3 Ways Anyone Can Use Online Video Immediately

By Jim Edwards in Featured

Tools for making online video get more common every day online. The latest craze, Flip Video cameras, make it simple and fun to snap high-quality video clips and use them for business or pleasure. Despite the widespread popularity of online video, most people think online video is only for the super-geeky set. But, with an influx of free and low-cost tools, online video has never been easier for everyone to get in on the “lights - camera - action!”

Video Blogging. Probably the easiest way for anyone to get started, video blogging or “Vlogging” combines the use of a blog with simple video “posts” on your website. You can sign up for a free blog at Blogger.com to act as your platform for making posts. Then, you can upload your videos (for free) to www.YouTube.com or http://Video.Google.com and they’ll convert your videos for online play. You can then take the copy-and-paste code either site gives you, paste that code into a new post on your blog, and voila, you’re officially video blogging. Blogger.com makes a great, fast way for you to set up a personal video blog, and it really is as simple as I describe.

If you want to put your blog on your own domain and hosting account (which I highly recommend if you operate a business), then you can get the best blogging software in the world for FREE by visiting www.WordPress.org. Once you create your blog on your own domain, you can post video exactly the same way I described above using YouTube or Google Video.

Video E-mail. Video email rates even simpler than video blogging. You can shoot your video using even a simple web cam and then email it to your family and friends. Now, this works great for smaller files, but once you get above about 3 Megabytes (MB), emailing those files becomes a pain for both you as the sender and your friends as recipients. However, you can easily share video files via email with the help of free online file hosting services. Services like www.Box.net and www.XDrive.com enable you to upload a file once, then email a special link to as many people as you want. They visit the link online and download the video file from the server rather than getting forced to download it as an email attachment.

By the way, these two services work great for sharing any large file, not just video.

Attract New Website Visitors. If you operate an online business, you know traffic represents the life-blood of your site. (If nobody shows up, it’s hard to make any money.) Video makes a great way to reach new viewers and get them to your website using FREE online hosting services. At a minimum, you should upload your videos to: YouTube.com, Video.Google.com, Revver.com, and MySpaceTV.com. You can also “announce” your video to multiple sites at once using www.TubeMogul.com (which offers both free and paid options).

If you want traffic, make sure to put your domain name across the bottom of the entire video so viewers can find your website or blog. Also, if you want people to get excited about you and your business, make sure your videos entertain people (no boring content), educate them (teach them something good), and empower them (give them something they can use). Following these simple rules will massively increase the pulling power of your videos to act as “traffic magnets” for your site.

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Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr^e articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website, affiliate links, or blogs… Need MORE TRAFFIC to your website or affiliate links? “Turn Words Into Traffic” reveals the secrets for driving Thousands of NEW visitors to your website NOW!Click Here> http://www.turnwordsintotraffic.com

7 Steps to Creating a Podcast from an Article

By Donna Gunter in Featured

I love to write once and repurpose the articles I write into as many marketing opportunities as a I can that will reach the greatest number of people. While podcasting has always intrigued me, I never wanted to take the time to create additional content for an audience who prefers to listen to their information rather than read it. Then it occurred to me that I could create podcasts from my articles by simply reading them (with some feeling and inflection) and integrate that into my weekly article marketing plan.

Podcasting is the process of creating audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online so that users can automatically download the files to listen whenever they want. Many will listen to the file via their computer, but since the file is portable, the listener can also download the file to the mp3 player, much in the same way they would download and listen to music.

Here’s my 7 step process to creating podcasts from my articles:

1. Write article. Yes, you have to begin here, as without content, you have no podcast.

2. Create introduction. There are actually 3 parts to your introduction. In the first part, give your podcast a name and create an introduction to who you are and what you do. Here’s an example:

“Hi and welcome to the (your name here) podcast. I’m (your name and title and description). What I do at (my company name) is….(your 10 second audio commercial).”

In the second part of the introduction, I create a short sponsor message. Instead of finding paying sponsors, which is a very viable option, I create sponsors by buying domain names for affiliate products that I routinely recommend and then use that domain name and description of my product as my sponsor. In this way I leverage the information I already have at hand (recommendations of trusted products and services for which I’m an affiliate) without the hassle of seeking out paying sponsorships.

© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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