One of my favourite sayings is “People laugh at me cause I’m different, I laugh at them cause they are all the same”. I don’t know who said it but that saying rings true with advertising. Save much more, the lowest prices, massive discounts is what everyone is saying in their ads today and those words go in one ear and out the other of the consumer. The shopper today is much more savvy when it comes to empty promises in a commercial. You have to be abel to stretch your boundaries of advertising today and yes you might be labelled as weird. Breaking away from what everyone else is doing could lead to not just failure but Spectacular failure, but on the other hand it could lead to amazing riches. I thank Roy Williams for this, just to show what going out on a limb can bring.
The New York Times tells us, “She embarked on a show-business career at 15 by going to Manhattan and enrolling in John Murray Anderson’s dramatic school. From the first, she was repeatedly told she had no talent and should return home. She tried and failed to get into four Broadway chorus lines, so she became a model for commercial photographers. She won national attention as the Chesterfield Cigarette Girl in 1933. This got her to Hollywood as a Goldwyn chorus girl. For the next two years she played unbilled, bit roles in two dozen movies. She then spent seven years at RKO, where she got leading roles in low-budget movies. But she was wrongly cast and mostly wasted in films.”
In all, Lucille Ball appeared in 72 B-movies before she became too old to be credible as a female love-interest. Her lackluster career on the silver screen ended without fanfare in 1948. So at the age of 37, Lucy left the movies, swallowed her pride and became Liz Cooper on the live radio show, My Favorite Husband.
Jess Oppenheimer, her director, tells the story. “I remember telling Lucy, ‘Let go. Act it out. Take your time.’ But she was simply afraid to try. So one day, at rehearsal, I handed Lucy a couple of Jack Benny tickets. She looked at me blankly. ‘What are these for?’
‘I want you to go to school,’ I told her.
It did the trick. When Lucy came into the studio for the next rehearsal, I could see she was excited. ‘Oh my God, Jess,’ she gushed, ‘I didn’t realize!’
She just couldn’t wait to get started trying out the new, emancipated attitude she had discovered. On that week’s show Lucy really hammed it up, playing it much broader than she ever had before. She coupled this with her newfound freedom of movement, and there were times I thought we’d have to catch her with a butterfly net to get her back to the microphone. The audience roared their approval, and Lucy loved it. So did I.”
Released from her fear, Lucy Ricardo had been born.
You see, you can be creative it’s all waiting for you just outside the box.
Thanks for the read and comments are welcome
Bryan Cox
You can visit my new web presence at Cox Marketing
It’s getting more and more crowded in the voice over industry. Yes, the competition is getting fierce. You can always tell if an industry is rocking by how many folks offer courses on how to be successful in that industry. In Voice Overs every time you turn around someone is shoving a course, a book a video your way to buy. I’m even included in that group…offering my “White Paper” for free or if you want to pay 10 bucks that’s cool too. I think that there’s almost the same amount of so called “teachers” as actual folks making money doing Voice Overs.
The VO White Paper was a huge success. I sent out over 300 to folks all over the World. Thank you all so much for your interest and I hope it helps you out with your career.
