Cutting-edge commercial trends

Presented by J. Michael Collins at the 2024 Euro VO Retreat in Barcelona, Spain

JMC discussed some changes and trends in commercial VO. You could hear a lot of them during the Super Bowl. The typical script direction of “conversational” is shifting to a more “I don’t care and I’m not trying” type of read. (For example, the Poppi commercial shown during the Super Bowl.)

Why? Because Americans are just done. Between COVID, the Writer’s Guild strike, auto worker strike and others in different sectors—we’ve just had it. The average American worker is done with caring about anything corporate. They're done with believing that companies want to do anything good for anybody. They're done with going to a bargain.

The “detached read” technique

“However, this read is not angry. There's a little self-righteousness, moral superiority, condescension or cynicism behind it. This read is just so done, that it's not even negative. If it starts to turn negative, it doesn't work because then it sounds like you dislike the brand. But if it gets too positive, it doesn't work because it sounds like you're trying to sell something. So it's just done. That is the psychology and found these corporations are smart enough and cynical enough that they are aware of this psychological shift in the population.” - J. Michael Collins

One key takeaway for a detached read that is written like ad copy, is that you have to forget the intent of the writing when you read it. Instead, treat the script as a series of statements. You don't have as much creative license [to “punch” the words and ignore the punctuation, for example].

We discussed a couple of other trends and then took turns reading commercial scripts with both “conversational” and detached reads. At the end, someone asked JMC to go around and tell each of us how he’d describe our sound in one word. He gave me two—authoritative and real (I get that a lot).