2018 Voice Over Casting Trends Indicate the Future is Female

Voices, the largest voice over marketplace in the world, recently released its annual Trends Report. Titled Voice Over Trends in Marketing and Advertising, 2018, one of the most notable emerging trends from the 2018 report was that “the future is female,” based on a current high demand for female voice over in what has long been considered a traditionally male-dominated industry.

This reported trend is supported by the statistics of over a quarter of a million transactions on the Voices marketplace. Using this information, the company has calculated that by 2025, the demand for female voice over talent will exceed that for male, in what could be an unprecedented event. 

The number of job postings on Voices that have specifically requested a female voice over actor for jobs that may have, in the past, preferred a male has been on the rise for a number of years. For example, over the past five years, the average growth rate of job postings that requested a female voice increased by 24 percent, outpacing the growth for job postings that requested a male voice by 8 percent for that same period. This is a trend that is intriguing for the 100-year-old industry, and, coupled with a nearly 60 percent increase of female users of the Voices platform since 2015, is a sign of female voice over professionals finding a foothold in an industry that was once male dominated.

According to the Voice Over Trends in Marketing and Advertising report, the “just-like-me” trend in advertising, where consumers prefer to hear someone who sounds like them, has also been gaining ground over the past few years and has correlations to Voices’s reported rise in preference for a more feminine sound. For 2018, Voices predicts a continuing push to select voice over talent who sound like the same dialect, age and gender as a brand’s or campaign’s target market. As the Harvard Business Review predicted in 2009 in the article The Female Economy, “women [. . .] will represent one of the largest market opportunities in our lifetimes.” This prediction is set to ring true in 2018, with Statista reporting that U.S. women are expected to spend $40 trillion this year, up $11 trillion since 2013, a shift that will see advertisers selecting more female voice over talent in an effort to attract these dollars for their clients and brands.

Buying power and market trends also have implications on preferences for celebrity voice overs and the vocal archetypes they represent, that producers, marketers, advertisers and consumers will gravitate toward for campaigns. One of the most in-demand vocal archetypes for 2018 was the Approachable Expert, as represented by the likes of female celebrities Meryl Streep and Emma Stone.

“With increased influence and improved representation, the future of voice over is certainly one that is female,” said Voices Chief Brand Officer, Stephanie Ciccarelli. “New devices on the market feature a woman’s voice, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, and the conscious selection of female voices has created a more balanced representation in an industry that directly impacts culture and buying patterns. This speaks to who has influence in the marketplace, a combination of the buyers and sellers.”

To read the complete 2018 Trends Report report here.

About Voices
Founded in 2005, Voices is the largest global online marketplace for audio and voice over products and services comprised of half a million producers, voice actors, and talent agents. Its flagship website, https://www.voices.com, records approximately two million unique visitors annually and has enabled over 250,000 transactions to date. Headquartered in London, Canada, the Company employs more than 100 people and has clients and voice talent in 139 countries.