Vanessa Jones Voices, Female Commercial Voice Actor

The art of the commercial voiceover is to move the listener. Ads that move us in some way, by inspiring us or making us laugh, serve almost a cathartic purpose. They allow us to experience deeper emotions and make us feel connected to something greater than our individual selves.

In the “soft sell” approach, the consumer is invited to put themself in the place of the people in the commercial and to relate to their problems. Then, the consumer experiences their joy and satisfaction when those problems are solved by the product or service being advertised. Rather than a “call to action,” a commercial might simply pose a rhetorical question at the end (i.e. “What’s in your wallet?”) or show appealing images, with the implication being that the consumer could experience these things firsthand if they used the product or service.

Vanessa doesn’t just read commercial copy with emotion. She skillfully breaks down the script to its structural components in order to understand how it creates that emotion. She looks for things like parallelism, repetition, and alliteration (literary devices she taught as a former English teacher). This crucial script analysis informs Vanessa’s choices of inflection and pacing, ensuring she doesn’t miss a beat.