VOICE OVER CAREERS
When people think of professional voice overs, they naturally think of television or radio commercials for TV or radio advertising.
Commercials, of course, always have maintained a high position on the list because they have residual value. On a network, particularly, you get paid every time it airs. Even if it doesn’t, if you’ve got a commercial and it runs in regional markets every 13 weeks, if they want to run it again, they pay you again. It’s a wonderful gig. So that little session fee might be multiplied by 5 or 10 or even 15 times.
Retail accounts can be tremendously lucrative. They might regularly produce six new commercials per week, with some of them running for a year. So there is money to be made there, and its residual factor makes it even more valuable. You make money despite the fact that you don’t physically do anything new. I’ve found that the corporate/industrial market also has a residual value. For some reason, that’s always surprising to people. Their reaction is, “What are you talking about?”
The producers involved in corporate/industrial work tend to find a few performers who can understand their business and talk their language. In some cases it’s pretty convoluted, particularly medical stuff; once they have found a female and a male and maybe a young male, they use those people over and over again.
Frequently you become a corporation’s voice. That means you have a residual value. You become the voice on all their training films and that introduces the CEO of the company at their annual meeting.
The corporate/industrial market employs a small group of people. If you can crack that code, if you can become one of the “go-to” people, you’ll discover that it, too, has residual value. They also pay on time, their budgets are pretty big, and it is frequently ongoing work.