The Zoomers to Boomers Business Show

Voiceover Secrets to Boosting Brand Recognition

• Hank Eder / Barby Molnar

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Discover how the right voice can transform your business's brand identity with insights from our latest guest, the accomplished voiceover artist Barby Molnar. With clients like Johnson & Johnson and CVS, Barby brings a wealth of experience and practical knowledge on how voiceovers go beyond animation and audiobooks to shape commercials, telephone systems, and explainer videos. Learn how a carefully selected voice can elevate brand recognition and seamlessly align with marketing strategies, making your business more relatable and memorable to customers. Through vivid examples, Barby demonstrates the undeniable power of a well-chosen voiceover in crafting a consistent and compelling brand persona.

Uncover the complexities behind voiceover pricing and the impact of emerging AI technologies on the industry. We break down the various factors that influence rates, from project type and usage duration to geographic reach, highlighting the significant effort involved in producing high-quality audiobooks. Additionally, Barby shares her perspective on the current limitations of AI voices compared to human talent and discusses legislative efforts by industry organizations to address these challenges. This episode is a must-listen for businesses eager to harness the full potential of voiceovers in their operations and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market.

Website: https://www.barbyvo.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barby.voice/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbyvo/

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Hank:

This is the Zoomers to Boomers Business Show and you're listening to bizradious all entrepreneurs all the time. Welcome everyone. I'm Hank Eder, also known as Hank the PR Guy, host of the Zoomers to Boomers Business Show, the show formerly known as the Home Business Success Show. You're listening to bizradious all entrepreneurs all the time. Our guest today, barbie Molnar, has been delivering professional voiceover services to clients such as Fiserv, johnson, johnson, cvs, mcgraw-hill, sap, bnp, paribus, banking, GSK Pharmaceuticals and the Missouri Lottery for the last four years. With a voice that's warm, natural, friendly and versatile, barbie lends her voice to commercial projects, medical narrations, explainer videos and a variety of corporate work. When not in her sound-treated home studio, barbie's probably in the gym, reading, playing tennis, singing or dreaming of faraway places to visit. She and her husband, john, have three grown kids and live in Orlando with their rescued pup, burke, who spends her days chasing lizards and squirrels. That sounds like an idyllic life for a pup. Welcome to the show, barbie.

Barby:

Thank you so much, Hank, for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm glad to be here.

Hank:

Oh, you're welcome. It's my pleasure. Well, if you would get us started by telling us what it is that you do, what are voiceovers, and can you give a few examples of certain types of voiceovers?

Barby:

Sure, sure, you know, for some people who have heard of voiceover, the first thing that their mind goes to is cartoons or animation, and the other thing would be audiobook narration. Oh, I've listened to audiobooks. Is that what you do? So that's one of the more well-known types, but that's almost an entirely different field of voiceover. So, yes, voiceover is anytime you are watching something or not watching something could be a commercial on the radio, but you hear a voice and you don't, but you don't see the person speaking. So it could be a TV or radio commercial.

Barby:

It could be you're walking around Marshalls and you hear this recorded voice. At first you think, oh, I wonder if that's the person at the cash register, but then you realize no, that sounds really polished, that's a voiceover. Or you call a business, like a large legal firm, for example, and you get that rotation of press one for this, press, two for this and so we call that IVR. That's a voiceover. You go to a website, a company website, and you see like an animation explaining the product that they sell, but there's a voice explaining that and that's an explainer video, and that's something that we do, I see what is what is ivr?

Barby:

ivr is um, uh, gosh, you're gonna, you're testing my, my acronym, acronym, you know what it's? It's uh, I can't think of what it is right now.

Hank:

It's virtual it's, it's basically telephony.

Barby:

Is what another? Another name for it.

Hank:

But it's one of the responsive.

Barby:

It's a virtual responsive telephone, so when you say something it responds to what you say.

Hank:

Oh, very cool. So the VR part is probably virtual responsive it's just the iPad?

Barby:

Yeah, exactly.

Hank:

Very, very cool. Well, you've just told me a little bit about how voiceovers are used for businesses. I mean, most of us are probably most familiar with the voiceover narration and what comes to my mind is that scene in Mrs Doubtfire where Robin Williams is putting in the voice for that bird in the cage, and I don't know if you've seen, mrs Doubtfire, absolutely.

Barby:

If you know that scene I'm talking about. I've actually watched it recently. So yeah, I love that. Of course you can't not love Robin Williams and everything he does and all the voices he's created.

Hank:

Exactly, I think.

Barby:

if he did the voiceover for the movie Aladdin the animated Aladdin.

Hank:

He did. I loved Robin, yeah. So how effective are voiceovers as a marketing tool for businesses?

Barby:

Well, I mean very effective it's. A voiceover is one of those fields that is very. It impacts so much and so, so much about business, but you don't see it, you don't know it, it's invisible. Until you're aware of it, until you understand and you've heard about it If it's a good voiceover, you don't even. You don't even know voiceover exists.

Barby:

So the purpose of it in business is one thing is brand recognition. You know you have a business like for what you do, hank, you've got your hip hop, your rhymes and that is so recognizable and you continue that. You perpetuate that. If you changed it from day to day you wouldn't have. You know people wouldn't have anything to latch on to. And it's kind of like that with voiceover. You in different ways. So you have a brand and your brand is you know the colors you use, it's the mood that you're trying to set. It's all of these things as a marketer that you you know as a PR person, you know it's all of these elements that come together and you have to have a voice that represents that.

Barby:

And if you don't, if you're just you know, if you don't have a voice that represents all the things you're doing, it might not all come together and, especially, depending on what you're doing, if you've, if you're marketing to a certain generation and maybe you want something that's really casual and your brand is casual, you want that voice. You don't want somebody answering your phone and having on your phone system that sounds extremely formal and corporate. You want somebody that's just like that person next door, that's just like hey, what's up? Kind of voice that people are going to be more relating to. That are your business type and your clientele type. So it's really creating that heart to heart connection for your business and what. Who you're seeking to serve, for them to feel welcome and understand that this is a place for them. That's one aspect of it.

Barby:

The other thing is you have a message that you want to provide right, and so that message, that voice, is to get your message out and communicate it as well as it can be communicated.

Barby:

And that might not be the assistant to the marketing VP, that might not be the business owner or his wife that knows the product, that knows what they want, but they don't have the training, they don't have the acting, they don't have the coaching, the experience and the knowledge of how to represent that information and communicate it effectively. So that's what my role is is to find out what the business owner wants, what they're trying to communicate, who it's being communicated to, and how to set that tone and how to communicate that. So, yeah, that's how it is for businesses, the purpose of it for businesses, and you can run that through your marketing campaign, you can run it through your advertising. It can be the voice on your phone, it can be the same voice on your website, it can be on your training modules for new employees, and so that gives you such a cohesive feeling to your business and I think any business would want that.

Hank:

I would think so. That is very cohesive and talk about, you know, branded content. That's really the heart of it. You know, I could think of one example right now. There used to be Canada Dry commercials where John Cleese from Monty Python would be the voice of that and he was talking about maybe getting a canary into the commercial. These were radio ads. He was talking about getting a canary into the commercial and the canary could say that Canada Dry ginger ale was not too tweaked, you know.

Barby:

Yeah, yes.

Hank:

But you know, visually I can think of other kinds of brand recognition, like Flo from Progressive Insurance. But that's video, not necessarily audio. I don't know if you ever hear Flo on the radio.

Barby:

I don't know. There's always a voiceover after Flo gets done doing her thing and that voiceover needs to keep that mood, keep that tone and keep that branding and that feeling and that mood from what Flo is just doing.

Hank:

That's really cool because, I mean everybody. There's certain things that everybody knows. Everybody knows Flo for a long time, until you know the actor got into trouble. Everybody knew Jared from Subway. Yes, yes, yeah, exactly. That being said, yeah, I would think voiceovers are a great benefit to business, especially when they're used properly. In voiceovers, pricing is not as straightforward as it is in other areas. Maybe you could shed a little bit of light on that, because just so people can wrap their brains around it, and maybe some of our listeners might be looking for voiceover artists to do certain things for them.

Barby:

Right, right, yeah, it is. That's a good question, because it is a very different pricing structure. It's not flat rates for most of the work that we do, and the reason for that is because if I'm hired to do a TV commercial, for example, my rate will depend on a couple of different things it will depend on is this a local TV commercial that's just going to be in Orlando? Well, that would be one usage. But what if they decide they want to do a regional, or if they want to do it nationwide? Well, now they're paying for my voice. They're paying for the use of my voice. They're not paying for a product that they went and buy and now it's theirs. It's still mine, okay. So what they're paying for is how many people is my voice reaching? And then the second level of that is for what duration of time? Because if you want to use my voice in Orlando for three months, then it's this price, okay. But if you decide, then, well, we want to make this go nationwide and we're going to run it for a year. Now, that's a whole nother thing. That is, you need to pay for more usage and for a longer duration of time. So you know, if I do that TV commercial for nationwide for a year and they decide they want to come back and do that commercial the following year and do that commercial the following year. They even if I do nothing, I've already done the work, the contractually that client will come back to me and let me know they're doing this. They will pay me for another year plus 10%. So that's how that works for commercial.

Barby:

Now if I were to do a book, okay, that's, that's a whole nother thing. For the book you pay per finished hour. That means when I get done reading your book and it's four hours long, for example, it might take me eight or eight to 10 to 12 hours to produce one hour of that book. So I'm going to charge you $400 per finished hour or $ hundred dollars for that book. And you know somebody might be thinking four hours, sixteen hundred dollars, but it's so many more hours when you know all of the process that goes into that, the training that went into that, the preparation, the reading the book, the finding out pronunciations, then you're recording, then you're, and you've got to master the audio, you've got to proof it, go back and make sure there's no word error or anything. So it is very time consuming to do audiobooks, that's long form narration.

Barby:

And then if you have something I don't know if I'm going into too much detail here, but like there are some other areas of voiceover where it's just you know, you pay and it belongs to the client now and those are things that you do internally. So if, if you wanted an explainer video for your website or you wanted the telephone recordings, those are per prompt. The telephone recordings you give me. You know eight prompts, then I'm charging you per prompt that you give me and that belongs to you now. And each time you want to change a prompt you send it back to me and I do more prompts and there's a per prompt price.

Barby:

If you want the video on your website, it's a one-time fee and it's based on how many minutes long Usually those are like one to three minutes long, but so for corporate type work it is per minute is the pricing and that stuff that stays in-house for your employees, for your clients that come to your site, so it's not being broadcast when it's being broadcast, that's where we go into the usage fees and the location fees.

Hank:

I see that's quite involved and no, I don't think he went into too much detail, but I think that the nature of it meant that it really needed that kind of detail so that people would understand are paying so much more for the audio books than they're paying for the print books. And in some cases it's because libraries these days are becoming underfunded. It's becoming a problem to the library to have those kind of contracts where they have to renew that contract for the audio book, whatever it is, every two years or something like that.

Barby:

Now that shouldn't be the case. If I do an audio book and I just finished doing a children's audio book recently, which was a lot of fun because I got to do some voices, you know some different character voices but if I do a book, it's it's. It's your per finished hour charge. You own it. I have done, my work is done. It is now yours.

Hank:

Maybe that have done. My work is done, it is now yours and maybe that's the publishing company that they're having issues with. Like, you know, if it's a big, if it's a large print, you know publishing company that's also doing the audio books. Maybe the deals they're cutting with the libraries is what was at what was at issue there. Yeah, you know, time is flying. I'd like to ask you this you know AI is creeping into everywhere. I mean, everywhere you look, ai is there and some people are touting the so-called benefits of AI narration and you know there could be a person who just looks like a real person. Even for video, they have a fake person and a fake voice, but only trained professionals can really tell the difference. What are the implications of AI for voiceover artists?

Barby:

Yeah. Well, there are some implications and that is one of the biggest conversations right now that's flying around the voiceover community. As a matter of fact, we've got people in voiceover. An organization one of the organizations NAVA the National Association for Voice Actors is going to Congress and trying to get some laws into place, because, first of all, these are sort of two separate issues, but they're related, no-transcript. But we also have the competition of the AI voice, of the AI voice. What we found, as we're talking about it and listening to a lot of the AI stuff, is that, yes, ai has gotten really good, but it's not as good as a human voice. And if you're listening to it for a while, you know the first couple of sentences might sound like oh yeah, this is a person. But at some point, if you listen for a little while, at some point getting distracted and thinking, is this a? It's kind of like have you ever had one of those phone calls where you start to answer them and you realize this isn't even a person.

Hank:

They set it up to ask you a question and it pauses for a moment for you to answer it, and then, once I caught on to that, it irritated me. No, I mean, it was horrible. I would just hang up right at that point, didn't want to hear what they had to say.

Barby:

Yeah, so yeah, AI, and AI is less expensive to use, of course, and is quick, but as I'm talking to people who use it, like a lot of what we call the e-learning industry, which is corporate training stuff, are going in that direction because they have such a bulk of work and it's like a high quantity of time, it's a lot less expensive for them for somebody to do six hours of, for an AI to do six hours worth of voiceover, than to pay someone to do six hours. However, some of the conversations I've had with some of these people who produce the material is the reality is, if you have a group of people that you're trying to impart information and they really need to learn this information and retain this information, if they are distracted by thinking, starting to their mind is wandering. Is this a human? Is this an AI voice? You know, are they retaining? Because there are distractions with that.

Barby:

And also the other side of that is, if you don't like something about the read with a human, you can just tell them, can you? Can you make this a little bit sunnier, Can you? And I'll know what you mean. Does the AI voice understand some of the terminology that we use and the nuances of that. So they're still working on those things. It's not always as good.

Hank:

Yeah, it's probably not nearly as good, not at this point in time, but I think the time will come that we probably don't know the difference. You know, time has really flown by. We're almost out of time. Flown by. We're almost out of time. If, very, very quickly, you can give one piece of advice to people who want to possibly pursue a career in voiceover, what would that be?

Barby:

Well that would be don't quit your day job before you do your research on this work. There's so much involved. A lot of people think that you could just go get a microphone and now you're ready to go. The work's just going to come at you. The work does not come at you. You have to have a lot of training, you have to have a lot of education and you need to really do a lot of homework before you step in. So that's, I mean, that's all I'd say. I don't want to discourage anyone. I think it's a great field, but definitely there's a lot to be done before you're ready to go.

Hank:

Well, how can our listeners get in touch with you? What's the best way?

Barby:

You can go to my website at Barbie Molnar, voiceover actor, and that's Barbie with a Y, not an IE like the doll. So it's B-A-R-B-Y-M-O-L-N-A-R. Voice actor, voiceover actor. That's my website. You can email me at Barbie at Barbie V-O, as in voice actor voiceovercom. I'm not saying this right, but or you can go to LinkedIn and find me. You can go to Instagram. I'm on Facebook. So, really, if you know how to spell my first name and my last name, you can find me very, very good.

Hank:

Well, thanks for being here with us today, barbie, and to our listeners, join us next Wednesday on the Zoomers to Boomers business show right here on bizradious. As you go about your day, I want to remind you to practice kindness. It's the greatest uniter this world has ever known. See you again next week. This is Hank Eder, wishing all of you a fabulous, productive and successful day.