Creative Voicemail Greetings

The Voicemail balancing act

Sometimes business communications can be a tricky, touchy can of worms. Just like a line-out 10 meters from the try line. Do you get the ball down early and go for the push-over? Or whip it across the backline and head for the corner?

Decisions. What goes through the advertising Director’s mind when the Copywriter comes up with a brilliant but very controversial script for the TV commercial?

The Director is the one who has to weigh up the risk and responsibility. The risk of possibly offending the audience versus the responsibility to get the product noticed.

It’s a similar dilemma when deciding on Creative Voicemail Greetings. However usually with Voicemail, you stand a greater risk of stepping on sensitivities.

 

Avoiding bombs

The telephone is a far more intimate way to communicate compared to running a TV campaign or scheduling a series of risqué radio ads. So the chances of you really getting up some noses can be very high.

You probably know from experience just how the script you thought was a harmless piece of fun can turn out to be the trigger for nuclear war.

Before you commit to any Creative Voicemail Greetings you need to take a deep breath and review the possibility of creating havoc at the switchboard.

It might be worth taking the script for the proposed greeting and running it past a few people around the office. If the budget allows, put it in front of a Focus Group.

Funny isn’t always clever

The most important thing is to not appoint yourself as the sole judge. Always remember what you regard as humour might be totally offensive to others.

It’s equally bad if the so-called creative effort is not easily understood or so oblique it becomes a topic of conversation for its weirdness.

Again remember that if people don’t readily understand something they’ll either totally ignore it (bad) or start complaining (worse). You could wind up on the camera after the nightly news having to explain your way out of a self-inflicted scandal.

The best way to avoid any and all of this is to call on the expertise of Media Group NZ, the business audio specialists. www.mediagroup.co.nz