Interview | The Ins and Outs of Voice Acting: The Voice Realm

Cubed3: How and when did The Voice Realm start, and how has the business progressed since then?

Lauren Maree, Client and Support Manager: The Voice Realm launched in March 2012. Quickly it has become one of the biggest voice casting sites with support from professional voice talent and some of the world's most recognised brands. We are now booking over 100 jobs per week!

Cubed3: How do you feel your company is different in comparison to places like Voices and Voice123?

Lauren: We don't accept anyone who has a credit card and is willing to part with $300-$350. All our voice talent are pre-screened and only the best are accepted. We have set a standard with online voice casting. Our clients are only presented with professional voice actors whose main goal is to service them in a timely manner.

Cubed3: What made you steer away from the 'bidding wars' approach taken by other companies?

Lauren: When you have a website that lists about 25,000 profiles it's obvious that there's going to be a lot of amateurs that clients need to sort through. It's also obvious that when you allow voice talent to bid against each other and set their own rates that it's going to push prices down. Voice talent then fall into the frame of mind that it's viable to do 10 x $100 jobs rather than hold out for the 'possible' $1000 job. All of our voice talent are professional, so we think that having a professional rate card was also an obvious choice.

Cubed3: What are some of the biggest clients that your talent roster has done voice work for?

Lauren: There are so many to name! Recent clients include PayPal, American Express, Hearst, Playboy, Mitsubishi, Emirates, and Medicare. Every week more and more clients use the site and then turn into repeat bookers.

Cubed3: Do you regularly take on-board feedback from users of the site to improve services, and can you provide examples of recent improvements?

Lauren: We are always seeking feedback from voice talent and clients. After all they are the ones that support us and use the site. For instance, recently we made some changes to our QUICKcast feature that allows clients to get cheaper rates by having a smaller pool of voices to choose from. The system used to randomly select a voice, but we changed this so that the client can now choose from a selection of five voices.

This was done after feedback from clients that they still wanted to have some say in which voice recorded their script.

Cubed3: Can you explain how your selection process works for enlisting new voice talents?

Lauren: We have a monthly meeting where four team members from the industry listen to demos submitted to the site. We make our selection on their experience, quality of demos, ability to follow direction, and dedication to their career and sound quality of their studio and microphone.

Cubed3: Does The Voice Realm offer any free tutorials or online seminars/discussion groups to help both newcomers to the world of voice acting, as well as veterans?

Lauren: At the moment we don't have any interest in coaching beginners or taking their money. We believe that you've got it or you don't.

Cubed3: Do you have special plans to expand the reach of The Voice Realm over the next 12 months?

Lauren: We have been expanding globally over the past 12 months with customer support now located in six countries. We have plans to continue to work closely with ad agencies where our major clients are coming from. Presently we work with agencies in the UK, Mexico, USA, Australia and Brazil.

Cubed3: Have you considered doing any cross promotional work with other businesses to expand your reach? Or perhaps running competitions to attract more voice talent and voiceover seekers?

Lauren: We already have agreements in place with a large number of ad agencies to supply voice talent and are constantly working to bring in new ones. As far as competitions go, we don't believe that it's the type of profession that would require this. Other sites benefit from having 5,000 voice talents all pay $350 each. We see having 4,000 amateurs as hurting the business. Instead we presently have a solid 500 of the world's best voice actors and our clients appreciate that.

Cubed3: Finally, what 'first steps' tips would you give to those wanting to get into the voice industry?

Lauren: Practice, practice, practice, and listen, listen, listen. Listen closely to national radio and TV commercials, but don't try and mimic them. The current style is NATURAL. Read ads from the newspaper out loud. Record yourself and listen back and critique yourself. Don't waste money on courses. Again, you've either instinctively got it, or you don't.