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Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Fifteen minutes

I spent most of yesterday sitting in a recording studio taping two 45 second radio ads. More accurately, I sat there watching the back Dave the engineer's head and listening to voice talent read the same lines 20 times. Watching radio commercials being made is a bit like watching paint dry. Or listening to paint dry.

It's a miracle how they are pieced together though. And it is a pretty lucrative gig for actors and moonlighting DJ's. You get paid pretty good to say the same three words in 50 different ways. Plus you don't have to wear a tie.

But like Alfred Hitchcock, I have grown fond of having a little bit of me show up in my work. So on one spot. I got to shout "Pull over" six or seven times in the recording booth and have it spliced into the commercial as a "sound effect."

One time, I had my 1976 era family portrait on a billboard. It was a really cool billboard of the inside of a car decked out to look like someone's parlour. The headline read, "Spending too much time in your car?" And there on the dashboard was my family portrait.

Another time I got to do the sound effect of a guy being poked in the eye with a pool cue.

Being a marketing manager has it's privileges.

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