"Does Your Brand Have a Voice?" with Global 
On Wednesday the 23rd of May CEW hosted the event “Does your brand have a voice?” with Global. The morning saw Bradd Tipler (Digital Group Head DAX) and Faye McDowall (Digital Strategist DAX) creatively show the CEW audience the importance of audio and voice strategy as well as asking the all-important question “Does your brand have a voice?”.
Introduced by Bradd Tipler, the audience were told that audio has never been more influential in the media, across technology and throughout business, providing statistics from Gartner that state “by 2020, 30% of web browsing will be done without a screen”. This figure helps to demonstrate the ever-increasing importance of audio which falls into three main categories: music streaming (with a 12.2 million weekly reach), radio streaming (with a 11.9 million weekly reach) and podcasts (with a 6 million weekly reach). 
Bradd continued to explain that technological advancements by ‘smart speakers’ have now put audio at the centre of our home lives and helped to contribute to the increasing growth of screen-less web browsing. Using visuals such as the ‘Hype cycle’ developed by Gartner, Bradd was able to visually demonstrate the journey that voice technology has been through across a period of time. 
To close Bradd’s half of the discussion, he ended by explaining how ease and convenience are the two main factors that drive voice activation. 55% of voice technology users stated that they do so for reasons of convenience, 52% said it is simple to use and 49% said they use voice because it is faster than typing. Overall, 72% of regular voice tech users believe that brands should have their own ‘unique’ voice such as Siri, Cortana and Alexa. 
Following on from Brad, Faye McDowall talked the audience through the ‘power that music has in influencing our behaviour’. According to Faye we interpret an enormous amount of information about people through sound, and the power of voice in particular leaves us with both emotional and social responses over and above body language. To demonstrate this point Faye played a series of soundbites including a ‘hairdressing’ scenario to the audience members through headphones.  
In conclusion of the morning Faye explained to the audience that evidence from Neurostrata suggests audio as being the lead driver of brand trust and intent at an implicit level. Faye stressed that it is of vital importance for brands to start exploring now what their individual ‘voice’ sounds like whilst we are still at the experimental stage. In years to come voice will only become increasingly important, and in order to stay ahead of the curve and not get left behind brands must think of their ‘voice’ as a key priority to succeed. 
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