VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Tom Test]

I am a BIG fan of the VoiceZam concept, and of the developer Bob Merkel. The way I look at the cost is that if I get ONE extra gig a year from it, it'll pay for itself - the rest is pure gravy. I'm about to do my first mass email campaign this year, and I think that I'll get a lot more than one extra gig from it a year. It's an investment, and one that I think stacks up well vs other ways I could spend my money (like buying another mic I don't need...).

You can check out my 11 VoiceZam demos at www.tomtest.com. I wrote about it in my latest blog post, which I will excerpt here rather than link to my blog:

"I have now incorporated the media player VoiceZam onto my site. I am extremely excited about this innovation, as I think it offers compelling advantages both for the talent seeker AND for the talent.

With VoiceZam, when a talent seeker visits my site, they click on my Demo links and the VoiceZam player pops up. Instead of simply clicking “play” and listening to the demo – probably fast-forwarding through to try and find exactly the read they need – with VoiceZam, they can quickly jump from track to track, each of which are individually listed and titled. The seeker can then download the entire demo, or download individual read(s). So when they go back to their client to review their chosen talents, it’s much easier for everybody to only listen to the relevant reads – rather than scrolling through full-length demos. It’s a simpler, faster, and more effective way for producers to find the right talent for their project.

As VoiceZam developer Bob Merkel puts it: “When I was a producer, I would listen to demos for hours on end. And like most in my industry, I would give up listening to each demo after the third or fourth track. But if there was a way to jump from track to track, I would have definitely listened to them all—as any good producer would….. That’s why I created VoiceZam. My engineering background led me to analyze the frustrations and barriers involved in making demos, and work to develop a more elegant solution. I set out to design a demo player system that would be an invaluable marketing tool for talent, while offering incredible features for producers. It’s a player that encourages listeners to remain engaged until the very end, as a tool where every track has its moment to be heard.”

For the VO talent, VoiceZam offers some compelling advantages. I am able to track listeners and get some great data about which clips are listened to in their entirety and which are quickly skipped. This is important feedback about which clips are the most attractive to my clients, and I can use this info to delete ineffective clips and replace them with better ones. Also, I can employ links in my email marketing which I can then use to track visitors to my site. For example, say I have a link in my email signature that is unique to a certain version of an email pitch, and say that I have 5 different versions which each use various strategies (different writing hooks, shorter or longer messages, etc). I can give each of the 5 versions their own unique VoiceZam link to my site, and I can tell how effective each version is in getting hits to my site! So I can use this data to fine-tune my message and make it most effective.

Also, according to the developer of VoiceZam, Bob Merkel (who offers FANTASTIC customer service!), his data shows that talent seekers – perhaps simply out of curiosity due to the innovative nature of this media player – will spend much more time listening to ALL the demos on a talent site using VoiceZam than a site which uses traditional media players. This is a great advantage to the talent because it enables me to demonstrate the full range of types of reads that I am competitive in. So if a seeker comes to my site looking for e.g., a warm-authoritative health-care or bank sort of read, they are likely to stick around after finding that particular read and play more clips. Maybe they’ll hear my snarky read, my quirky read, my friendly energetic retail read, and remember it next time they need something like that for another project.

VoiceZam is so useful on so many levels, I think this sort of technology should be used by every VO talent and every talent agency site. Check it out at http://www.voicezam.com/"
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Best regards,
Tom Test
"The Voice You Trust"
www.tomtest.com

[Tom Test]

Just a few days ago, a German client of mine from bodalgo went to my site and told me that we wanted the "PolyMicro Technology read," and I knew exactly what he meant. It's tough enough for a talent seeker to describe what sort of read they need, even if English IS their first language. Consider how useful it was for this client, whose English wasn't great, to simply be able to ID the read he wanted from a VoiceZam clip. I could imagine this aspect of VoiceZam being very useful even to people who DO speak English.
_________________
Best regards,
Tom Test
"The Voice You Trust"
www.tomtest.com