VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Tom Test]

Hey there,

How do you name your demos, and what is your strategy for doing so?

While putting around my Voices.com profile yesterday, I discovered some interesting stats about how often my demos get listened to. I want to share this info with the group because I think it gives some insight about how best to title our demos.

I have 10 specialized demos listed on Voices.com, and here are their titles and how many listens they have (I'd love to hear your stats as well if you have them):

Tom Test Sampler (1:15 of commercial, narration and promo) – 192 listens
Narration – 62 listens
Instructional Demo – 49 listens
Characters / Dialogue – 32 listens
Radio / TV Commercial – 22 listens (I’m shocked at how low this was!!)
Medical /Technical demo - 21 listens
Promos /Trailers – 19 listens
Political Demo – 14 listens
Public Service Announcements – 18 listens
Real Person/Testimonials – 4 listens (but incredibly, I got 2 PSA jobs from this!)

So, how does which words we use to name our demos make a difference in how often they get listened to? “Narration,” “Medical/Technical,” and “Instructional” all have some overlap in material. But I think it’s good to have separate demos for the latter two, because they can help talent finders locate the sort of read they are looking for more accurately than they might with a vague term such as “Narration.”

I am thinking of changing the “Instructional” demo to “e-Learning.” I think it might get more hits that way. But what do these different names mean to people? Do they seem to offer something different? What about using the term “Training”? Most of the work I do that I would call e-Learning falls under what I would consider Training.

Also, I am very surprised at how few listens I had for my Radio/TV Commercial demo. I think this shows that the percentage of total work through Voices.com that is Radio/TV is much lower than I supposed.

Finally, and perhaps this is a topic for another thread, but how useful do you think it is to have highly specialized demos? I think it IS useful, and since I produce my own demos, it only costs me my time. I only had a very few listens to "Real People," but got one gig last year from this demo. Similarly, I had only a handful of listens to my PSA demo, but got 2 gigs from it. I'm thinking of breaking down my Narration demo into Sales/Product oriented material and Training material. Heck, that still leaves IVR, Documentary, Audiobooks, and tons more.

Anyhow, I’m sure there are more facets to this discussion that I could bring up, but let’s see where the discussion leads us. I’d love to hear what YOU think!
_________________
Best regards,
Tom Test
"The Voice You Trust"
www.tomtest.com

[Lee Gordon]

Here are my Voices.com demos and the number of plays associated with each one:

Audio Book - Fiction Audiobooks 1,059.18 Mb alpha-numeric 43
Audio Book - Non-Fiction Audiobooks 992.65 Mb alpha-numeric 10
Character Voices Cartoons 1,401.63 Mb alpha-numeric 1159
Commercial Demo Radio 1,958.37 Mb alpha-numeric 45
E-Learning Demo Educational 1,640.20 Mb alpha-numeric 20
IVR - Voicemail Telephone 1,403.88 Mb alpha-numeric 68
Narration Demo Business 1,412.25 Mb alpha-numeric 25
Santa Claus Demo Cartoons 0.44 Mb alpha-numeric 15

The italicized words are Voice.com's category terminology. As you can see, there is a glaring discrepancy between the Character demo and all the others. My Commercial, Character, and Narration demos have all been up since Day 1. Interestingly, it occured to me to put up a Santa demo only a couple of weeks ago and it already has more listens than one of my audiobook demos and nearly as many as the narration and e-learning demos that have been posted for well over a year.

Clearly, the job posters are spoiled for choice with commercials and narration demos and therefore don't really need to go looking for them.
_________________
Lee Gordon, O.A.V.
Voice President of the United States
www.leegordonproductions.com
Twitter: @LeeGordonVoice