In the past few years of working as a voiceover artist, I’ve come to notice some trends.
In 2020-2021, It was the Covid Employee Rally Video. It always started with the line “In these uncertain times…”. Did companies actually motivate their employees to “come together as one” because “together, we are stronger”? I would like some actual data on this. I’m curious. All I know is I poured my heart out in each of the 452,365,764,234 auditions I did. That’s not an actual number, obvs. But it feels pretty close. I can’t bring myself to read those auditions anymore. Believe it or not, they still pop up.
In 2021 and 2022 I really started seeing an uptick in auditions relating to remote working software. Mostly programs you can use to stay organized within a company: virtual boardrooms, drawing rooms, tools you might compare to Slack, etc...because Covid. In 2023, I see a lot of auditions for cloud management solutions, migration solutions, and anything with the words SaaS, Cloud Native, and Silo in the script.
Of course, there are always seasonal voiceover trends - Christmas ads starting in August for the organized companies (and December 20th for the less organized companies), back-to-school ads starting in July, Mother’s Day ads starting in April, etc.
This summer, though, specifically from April throughout all of July, it was AI’s turn. Where before I might have seen one audition out of every 250 or so auditions requesting demos for an AI voice platform or TTS project, there were days in July when 50% of my auditions were for AI platforms. I was devastated. This is the wave of the future. Adapt or die, sh*t on the pot or get off it. What do I do? That’s a question a lot of my VO friends are asking themselves, too. Union or not, for obvious reasons.
Now, because I’m not union, I have recently seen an uptick in higher-paying commercial jobs due to the union strikes in the US. When contracts end, a brand needs a sound-alike. That’s where we come in. But if we take those jobs, we’re screwing with progress…
What’s a VO to do…?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I can tell you that I'm trying to stick to my favorite trend of all, comedic small banking commercials. There’s nothing like a goofy mortgage or accounting commercial where the woman/wife/mom loses her mind trying to crunch numbers while yelling at her husband/kids/random stranger to get me smiling in my vocal booth. Perhaps this is just a reflection of how I’m feeling these days. Obvious, much?
What trends are you noticing? Which are your favorite?
