Knowing Where to Draw the Line as a Voice Actor with David Goldberg

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Hi there and welcome to Vox Talk, your weekly review from the world of voice over. I'm your host. Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices. Do you audition for every job you get invited to? Or do you find yourself turning down work based on your values and beliefs? Joining me today is David Goldberg, CEO of Edge Studio. Recently, Edge Studio put out a survey asking if talent would record for a product or service they didn't believe in or use their voice to promote a political candidate they did not support. We'll discuss some key takeaways from the survey as well as tools you can use to figure out which jobs you want to do. Welcome to the show, David.

David Goldberg:

Thanks so much for bringing us on.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, as soon as I saw that this was happening, I thought, oh my goodness, I need to have David on the show and talk about this survey they're doing. So can you tell us more about the survey and why you decided to run it?

David Goldberg:

Yeah, great question. There are so many conundrums that come up in this industry, and because we are educators and we guide so many voice actors, we are very often faced with these predicaments ourselves. Voice actors call us up and say, do you think this or do you think that? And very often there are lots of different sides to a story, right? There's just not one answer. There's not one answer that fits all in probably any industry, but certainly not in voiceover. And so this one question came up and we thought it was really interesting and so we thought we would publish it and elicit back some responses. And so we did that and the responses we received were phenomenal. The answers are all over the place. They really make you think about your own career. So we asked, would you record a voiceover for a product or service or candidate that you don't believe in? And yeah, the responses that we received were really interesting.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Wow. I imagine they would be all over the map because you have a following from everywhere, so all kinds of views represented, for sure. So did you see a balance between what were the possible answers, what were the choices they had?

David Goldberg:

Yeah, to your first point, the answers did come from everywhere, including numerous countries. We could tell just from the there the voice actors’ responses, which was really interesting to get, like an international perspective. And we grouped all of the responses into three categories. One for voice actors who said, absolutely I would record it, second category where maybe it depends, and third category was no, absolutely not. And so we have put those onto our blog and organized them that way and yeah, it's pretty cool.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Right on. So from looking through all the comments because thank you for sending those to me so I could understand and appreciate what the survey results were, it looked like some voice actors and certainly we see this just all over the board, right? Some voice actors see their work as being separate from themselves while other voice actors strongly equate the kind of work that they do with who they are, with their personality, what they think of as important to them in their day to day life. So why do you think that that is? Why is there kind of one group that is happy to do anything regardless and in another that is perhaps more selective?

David Goldberg:

I thought a lot about that and I never came up with the ultimate answer. But I think it just depends on someone's situation. I don't think there's one answer. I think looking at the responses, some people said, look, it depends on whether or not the voice actor is hungry. If they need to put food on the table, you'll do anything for your family. We had voice actors who said, ‘look, I'm also an actor and as an actor, I play the character, the role of movie and TV show characters who I may not even agree with their personality, their disposition. I could be playing the part of a bad guy on a cop show.’ Where do you draw the line? Of course people's scruples were a large part of the answers that came in. I will say that possibly the most interesting thing was that just about an equal third of people said yes, they would record a job given that they don't believe in the product, service or candidate, a third said maybe and a third said no. It was very evenly split.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, that ‘maybe’ group. That's an interesting one because I guess under certain circumstances they may feel compelled or want to voice something that they wouldn't typically voice. And that doesn't mean that they don't agree with it in principle. It might just mean, well, I don't turn my mic on for less than $250, but maybe for that client because I really like it and they've only got 175, I might do it. So there's different ways that a voice actor might, shall we say, deviate from what they would normally do. So I know that sometimes it's about that. But in this particular survey it was more so to do with the work that they would want to do, as in ‘the work that I feel confidently, that I support, that I feel authentic when I'm voicing it and that I genuinely want to see whatever it is I'm doing succeed,’ right? That's the whole point. People go to a higher voice actor because they want to communicate a message and they want to do it effectively to an audience that it goes into the ears of and hopefully the hearts and minds because that's the whole purpose of a message. Be it advertising, be it a character in a role, be it whatever it is, there's always something behind that voice and what that message is. So yeah, I just find this very interesting that we're seeing all kinds of different responses and as you said, possibly people from outside of the US. I know it's very heavily slanted toward the US here with more American talent answering. But that said, I think that everybody faces challenges in their countries that might be different. They're not always political. Sometimes it could be a religious thing. It could be just something that you feel strongly about that you wouldn't want to do. Maybe it's preferential, right? It doesn't have to be, ‘It's this one big bad thing.’ It could be any number of different reasons for why a voice actor might not do work or may do work, or will always do that work, right? And this brings me around to a question about brand, David, because I know that at Edge, you guys are really serious about helping people develop their brand to know what it is to market themselves well and to establish their own place in the industry, right? Yeah. So as we're talking about that and how every business, of course, needs a brand and the voice actors are no exception. All of you down from your headshots to the website to the logos you have designed, this is all branding, right? So all of this being taken into account, what should voice actors be thinking of when creating their brand, knowing that it communicates so much about them?

David Goldberg:

I do feel that it's very important to have a brand and I think that voice actors sometimes take that to be to think that that's going to be an expensive proposition to hire marketing agencies to figure out who they are and the clients that they will reach. So I think that I'd like to put your question and the answer into a bit of perspective, if that's okay. One is that when voice actors are brand new, sometimes they don't know the industry well enough and clients don't know their voice well enough for them to even figure out what it is that they want to specialize in where their brand should be. So it is pretty common for voice actors to launch their careers without branding. I don't think it's a great thing. But there are certainly a number of voice actors who go out there and try to be everything to everyone and at some point they start saying, in fact, someone said this to me just a day or two ago, they say, ‘I started noticing that I'm always getting hired for one particular kind of work and maybe that should become my brand.’ But there are other voice actors who come into our doors who are brand new and say, ‘I don't know anything about voice over.’ We put them through an evaluation process and they say, ‘You know what, Audiobooks?’ Clearly that's that's what I want to be focusing on. And and so we build them into this industry. We let them grow in this industry with that brand already in place, which is great. What's also interesting is that a lot of voice actors, they don't realize that there is a lot of potential work out there in different genres. So they come into this industry and they think the only work out there is commercial work or perhaps animation work. Or they come into the industry and they say, my voice is, I've always been told that my voice is great for one genre. So they come in with a predisposition of where they belong in the industry. But in reality, when we train them, when we go through training and coaching and demos with them, we realize that they really are more marketable in another genre. And sometimes those voice actors heed our advice and they say, ‘You know what? I'll trust you. That's great. I thought commercial work is where I should be, but now you've opened my eyes that there is a lot of different kinds of work and I will pursue the other genres which you feel would be more marketable for my voice.’ People are people, really. That's what it comes down to, right? People come in with different aspirations, different ideas in mind. Some people want to take our advice, some don't. And that's all fine. We're there to guide people the best we can and ease them through their career and like, you know, do everything we can to help them launch their career and become successful. Where this whole concept of or the whole question of whether or not they should take on a job or not because they believe or don't believe in a product, that is interesting because there are some voice actors who are saying, ‘Look, it's not my specialty, that's not my branding, so I will avoid it anyway.’ It's like an easy out for them. So I hope that answers your question.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, no, I think it does, because brand is important. What most people don't think about, though, is where does the brand come from? Because you spoke about what someone's voice might be suited to or what kind of work they're just drawn to and where their artistic abilities might sit better in the ears of the audience. But what I think someone needs to know before they even walk in your door, David, is what is the sort of work that I'm willing to do versus what am I not going to do? But also what is the stuff I'm passionate about? Because those are the sorts of jobs that they're going to want to go after and possibly frame their brand around or at least the messaging that they promote themselves with and possibly the kind of spots that they put on their demos and so on.

David Goldberg:

Yeah, that's a great point. We look at three things, three different criteria. When we're helping someone figure out their brand, we look at their actual voice. Which genres is their voice even marketable for? We looked very much at their interests, their personal interests, as you're suggesting in this question. Because when someone reads something or they read about something on a topic that they personally enjoy, they bring so much more to the table. Yeah, they don't necessarily need to be subject matter experts, but if they enjoy a particular subject matter, then they just read it with more passion and that is translated to the ears of the listener, it's amazing. The third thing we look at are goals. A voice actor may say, I want to do this full time or part time. I want to only work in commercials. I only want to narrate audiobooks. And whatever their goals are, we sort of find the intersection, I'd say, between their goals, their personal interests and their voice. And actually, I would add in the fourth category at times, and that is just their personal lifestyle that has to be taken into consideration because some people don't have the time to narrate audiobooks. Audiobooks is a demanding job in terms of the number of hours that need to be set forth. And so if someone doesn't have the luxury of getting a call from a client who says, I have a book that needs to be recorded in the next two weeks or three weeks, and it will take you about 20 or 30 hours, if someone doesn't have that kind of time set aside, then they shouldn't even bother getting into audiobooks. There are lots of genres in this industry which do have sort of lifestyle requirements. Whether it's the time of the day that things are recorded or how quick things need to be turned around. Whatever the case, I'd say that there are those four categories that we look at someone's goals, their personal interests, their personal lifestyle, and their actual voice. Once you find that intersection, people are so much more successful in this industry, it's amazing.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Right. And not only does it make them more successful, it also helps them to save time because you're not wasting that time trying to do the mental gymnastics required to say, am I a fit for this or should I pass?

David Goldberg:

Yeah.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Or does this fit well with how I want to present myself as a professional and have my name and or voice affixed too? Because I know talent. You are recognized by your voices even though you are not seen. You're not on camera most of the time. I know there are a lot of talent who follow each other and study what the others are doing. And certainly your coaches or agents will know if it's you or not. The one area where I wonder about and I'm going to jump down in our questions to this is that if you turn down the request of an agent or a casting director that is more closely in charge of possibly the trajectory of your career, are they going to respect you for having that boundary? Or are they going to find a reason not to call you back next time?

David Goldberg:

Yeah, I was thinking about that when we were just talking a moment ago, because when we turned down this ad agency, it was a new agency to us. And turning down this one campaign meant possibly mitigating or eliminating future work from this agency in general. There could have been a spiral of incoming work right from that particular agency, assuming that we did a good job on the campaign, the audio portion of the campaign, they could have brought more work to us. And so that was a big decision. And that was probably in terms of money, that was probably the largest situation I've been in as of owning this business in all 34, 35 years. That was a big job. And so I have had conversations with clients when I say, look, I love your work. I'm really anxious to work with you. However, this is where I have to draw the line on this particular job. But can we talk about continuing to work on other projects? And sometimes it's worked, sometimes it hasn't. Sometimes the client is going to say, ‘If you can't help us, if we can't count on you 100% of the time, we need to find someone who we can count on 100% of the time.’ I can understand that. We all have vendors and services, service providers we call on, and it's nice to be able to rely on someone and not have to worry like, well, ‘Will they do it this time or not?’ So certainly we've lost some work. But I also think that I know for a fact in a couple of situations, when I've reached out to someone, they've said, you know what, we really respect you saying this to us, and they have come back and given us work. So I haven't lost all clients, but certainly I think some.

David Goldberg:

Well, I'm really encouraged, David, about what you said about how some of those clients actually respect your position and maybe even think more highly of you because of your just being very principled in how you were going about things. But I'm just wondering because the drumbeat that I continue to hear from casting directors and agents is that they want what is best for the voice actor. They want to do the best job possible. They're the voice actor's friend, all of these things. And if that is true, one would think that they would either know this information about the talent before they presented them with an opportunity because they've taken the time to build relationship, rapport, to say, ‘oh, well, I won't do the cigarette commercials,’ or ‘I can't possibly be seen with this kitchen device,’ or whatever it might be. Right? It's a strange little thing to think that just saying no once might ruin your relationship with someone for other kinds of work that you might do with them. But in the agency casting world, at least the agency world, I would really hope that the talent are having these in depth conversations with their talent agent or prospective agents because this is kind of maybe a make or break for whether they rep you or not. It's like, ‘I need people who can either do this or that or this voice type, or we can't do many people doing this sort of thing.’ Those conversations would be clearly had, understood, respected. The two parties know where they stand. Now with casting directors, obviously you don't work with the same CD every time, somebody's just called in and you don't necessarily have that relationship. But from what I understand of their hearts, so far as what I can see online, in panel discussions I've heard, very much supportive of the actor. So is it a far cry to say that they of all people should be more understanding or am I overstating?

David Goldberg:

I think you're overstating, but for a different reason. What you're saying makes a lot of sense and I agree with you and I wish it was that way, but there are so many situations that come up where this question that we're discussing today arises. So, for example, recently we had a job for a vegan company. It's a brand new vegan website. They have some explainer videos on their website and they're looking for a new voice actor. And they were very clear to me that they don't want anyone who eats meat to be the voice actor. They want a vegan to narrate this vegan spot. And that makes sense. Now, we could have reached out to voice actors who we have worked with for years and said, ‘Hey, would you like this job? I think your voice would be great for it.’ And then I could have brought those auditions to the client and the client would have said, ‘Well, their voice is great, but are they a vegan?’ I'd say ‘I don't know,’ because that's a question from our casting department. That's a question that I would ever think to ask a voice actor. And so there's just so many situations where a voice actor may feel against something that we couldn't begin to ask everything. I don't think it's feasible.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, returning to the vegan comment, that is not just a way of eating. It is very much a lifestyle. So I understand how someone, a brand in particular, would want to be represented by someone who held to what they say this is what goes along with being vegan. And I'm not trying to say every vegan is the same. I do not want to make that mistake. But so far as the reasons for why someone might be vegan, it must be a strange tightrope to walk.

David Goldberg:

In our casting department. We don't have a hard time asking right now. We are doing a rather large job for an animal activist organization as they're international and we're putting out some videos and we are actually donating our services. We do that for a large number of organizations that I personally believe in. And we are seeking voice actors who feel the same way about animals, about animal rights. And so part of our whole casting is, ‘Are you willing, do you want to donate your services along with our donation and to support this organization?’ So that is part of the casting call. So sometimes it's just the makeup of the voice actor we hire. So certainly there are times that we seek a voice actor. We say we need to concern ourselves with the gender, the age, the language, you know, a couple of emotional types of voices. You know, there's not that much to the voice. But in this situation, we are actually seeking a personality trait. You know, do you like animals? Are you for animal rights? We're doing another job right now for a very large global company, global sustainability company. And we're seeking voice actors who are very pro environment and support the environment. So sometimes those things do end up in our casting requests. But I don't know if that's the case with agents, as we discussed, or with other clients. But, yeah, that does become part of our thing sometimes.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, because I've spoken to a number of agents who do really think that matters, to talk to people about what is most important to them, the voice actor and what they feel most comfortable recording for. But, yeah, I just thinking that's a lot of stuff to have to consider.

David Goldberg:

Yeah.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And I was thinking about all the maybe, all the maybes in there. And it's kind of like, well, how far animal rights supporting do I need to be to qualify to do this job? Do I have to be I don't know. I guess you would get the gist of that from the casting. You would understand what spectrum of animal rights activists you might be or how far you might go on just the environmental piece, let alone the animals rights, because that can be related and or separate. right, depending on how you're looking at things. And it's kind of like, wow, there's so much going on in all of this. And be it religion, be it politics, be it food choices, because obviously food choices are kind of a big deal now for reasons other than the food themselves at times, you know? Absolutely. I can imagine that this must be just an area that talent has not thought of, not really hard about. And they only just recently have had to either create more nuanced thought in this area because of just all the various ways that they are seeing things happen in the world today based on how they view the world and what's going on. But this is a whole new ballgame, I would say, because if someone walked into a studio 30 years ago, they might have not wanted to record the cigarette commercial, right.

David Goldberg:

Right.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

But now there might be three or four other periphery reasons why you might not want to do something. I think it's just an encouragement. We need to leave people with encouragement today, David. So before we go, I just want to ask you, what can people be doing to get voice work for things that they really love and they're passionate about and they have zero qualms with doing? Because what we want to do here is make sure that people feel equipped, that they're supported, and that they've taken something from the show that they can do today. So what is one thing or what are several things that they can do to help find that work that they want to do and be really proud of?

David Goldberg:

Yeah. So that really circles back to what we spoke about earlier, about branding. I really believe that when you enter this industry, if you have a brand and it's something that you personally endure, something you believe in, something you're passionate about, something you're experienced with, you will be so much more successful. And many of our most successful voice acting students who come through our doors and really succeed in their careers, they focus on, like, a niche of the industry, a pretty specific niche. They pigeonhole themselves into one little area of this voiceover world. And usually at first, they're very concerned about that because they think, ‘Oh, my goodness, like I'm pigeonholing myself in. There can't be that much work.’ But there is work out there for specialists in every type of work out there, from medical physicians to accountants to whatever it is, technology experts. There are places for niche experts, and that holds true in voiceover. Voice actors can be so much more successful when they really fine tune what they offer, their branding, when they fine tune it down to what fits their voice, their personal interests, their lifestyle, their goals. You can do so much in this industry. There is so much work in this industry. You just have to find it. And the more, I find, usually not always, but for most voice sectors, when you focus on, when you focus your efforts, when you focus your career in one area, you can be much more successful. There's a great analogy, Stephanie. It's as simple as opening up a restaurant. If I said to you, hey, I'm opening up a restaurant on the side, you could say to me, ‘That's cool. What kind of restaurant?’ If I said, we'll serve food – it's weird, right? It's just too general. Here I am trying to be the jack of all trades and master of none, right. Which is the perception. And if I said, well, you know, we're going to we're going to sell just Italian food, or just that kind of food, or something that pinpoints. And if I became more specific and I said, ‘Yeah, it's a restaurant that focuses on organic Italian food, all catered from Italy, or all ingredients brought in from Italy with an Italian chef. Like, we're importing a chef, we're poaching a chef from a big restaurant in Italy. And bringing them in.’ And now there's a real focus on that restaurant, and that restaurant becomes very interesting, and people will talk about it. And people who like Italian food are more apt to try that particular restaurant rather than a restaurant that just serves food.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Exactly.

David Goldberg:

You can really do well when you find that branding, which really does support the question, would you work for a client or product or service or candidates that you don't believe in? Well, if you're branding yourself, you won't really even ever face that conundrum, which is interesting.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And I think it makes life a whole lot easier, too. Right? That is wonderful advice, David. Well, thank you again for joining me on the show. It's always an exciting conversation to talk to you, David, and we'll look forward to having you again on the show soon.

David Goldberg:

Well, I'd like to thank Geoff in the background for doing an awesome job here putting this together. Thank you, Geoff. Stephanie, you're awesome, as always.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah.

David Goldberg:

Thank you so much for having Edge Studio on.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And that's the way we saw the world through the lens of voice over this week. Thank you for listening and for spending time with us here on Vox Talk discussing, I might say, a very important topic. A very special thank you to David Goldberg from Edge Studio. And for those of you who don't know, Edge Studio is a great educator in North America, and you can study with them, I think, remotely from anywhere, never mind going to the studio in person. And they do demos, too. And so all the branding stuff that you just heard about today, I know that they, of course, work material on that as well. So if you're looking to create a brand or try to find ideas, you might want to check them out for that. So to find Edge Studio, just go to edgestudio.com. And for Voices, I'm your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli. Vox Talk is produced by Geoff Bremner. Thank you again for tuning in, and we'll see you next week.