Marketers who are hiring voice-over artists want them to capable of building emotional bonds with their audience, a new survey has found.
According to research by Voices.com, 92 per cent of marketers said the ability to forge a connection with the audience is their main consideration when selecting voice talent.
This, it said, reflects their overriding aim to increase people’s trust in their brands.
The survey also found that the number of postings for female voices is going up at a higher rate than that for men. And as a result believes the number of job postings for female voices will eventually overtake that of males by 2025.
In addition, the research revealed that natural and human-recorded voices are favoured over synthetic or artificial tones.
Indeed, 93 per cent of marketers agreed that human voices are more powerful than those generated by a computer.
Demand for voice-overs in non-English languages and English spoken in regional accents is also tipped to continue increasing in 2018.
This trend demonstrates marketers’ intent to create “more relatable and engaging connections to audiences”.
Voice-over artists are largely being hired to target younger adults, with 39 per cent of voice-based campaigns focused on millennials and 54 per cent on Generation X.
With this in mind, more than three-quarters of marketers are actively choosing voice-over actors who sound the same age as the people they are aiming to reach.
David Ciccarelli, Chief Executive of Voices.com, said: “The need for voice to elicit an emotional connection by sounding conversational, authentic and engaging will continue to be a trend in 2018.
“As millennials and Gen Xers have become the target audience for the majority of advertising campaigns, creative professionals have begun to shift away from the authoritative sound that has dominated the voice-over industry for so long.”
He added that instead of sounding professorial or even robotic, brands want the voices speaking for them to sound like a “knowledgeable friend.”
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