Let me hurl some possibly surprising statistics at you about the benefits of radio advertising, courtesy of Nielsen:
Consumers today spend an average of more than 1.5 hours per day listening to radio. And if you compare people who listen to a lot of radio (‘heavy radio users’ in media lingo) to people who are heavy TV users, the radio listeners are more likely to work, are younger, and have a higher household income.
That’s why radio can make sense from a strategic point of view. But here’s one of the other major advantages of radio advertising: It’s nimble. We can walk into a recording studio with a script and have a finished radio spot by the end of the same day.
Producing radio and working with voice talents is fast and fun. Sometimes we get to work with truly gifted people with eye-opening Wikipedia bios: guys like James Arnold Taylor, one of the best and best-known voice talents in the country.
James has become the radio voice for Amica Life, a client of Cronin’s, but he’s also a real-life man of a thousand voices and a legend in the world of animation and video games. I guarantee you’ve heard him somewhere, sometime. He’s been Obi-Wan Kenobi in The Clone Wars. Ratchet in the Ratchet and Clank video games. Fred Flintstone. The Flash. You’ve even heard him, but didn’t know it, voice-doubling for Johnny Depp in the movies.
If you’re curious about the world of voice performance, watch the video logs that James has created. Cronin recently produced a series of radio spots for Amica Life, and James used those sessions to provide some pointers. Be sure to catch the end where James does a rapid-fire demonstration of his vocal talents. It’s a unique look into a very specialized field.