The MarTech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. from advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients we've seen a 55 to 65 percent open rate getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than tv advertising typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing. Welcome to the MarTech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the MarTech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro. 90%. 90% of consumers fail to correctly identify AI-generated voices, even though most believe they could, according to a study by Twilio. AI voices aren't just good enough, they're indistinguishable. So if we're crossing the threshold of differentiating humanity from computing, what's the impact on marketers? Well, we're entering a world where your customers don't visit your website. They don't see your logo. They don't type a query. They just talk. And in that world, your voice isn't a feature. It's your brand. I'm Benjamin Shapiro, and joining me today is Ruth Zive, the Chief Marketing Officer at Voices. Voices works with over 60,000 enterprise customers, including Microsoft, BMW, and Shopify, to power their voice experiences across marketing, products, and AI systems. And today, Ruth is going to explain how you need to rethink brand building in a voice-first world. Ruth, welcome to the Martech Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. Excited to have you here. Excited to talk about something that's near and dear to my heart. I named a company I Hear Everything, so I feel like talking to voices from I Hear Everything is a conversation we probably should have had a while ago. Absolutely. Absolutely. Ruth, you joined Voices at a critical moment. Why did you think that this opportunity was worth it to take on your fourth role as a CMO? Yeah, it's a great question. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, but there definitely was a pull there. I was excited about, you know, Voices is a two decades old marketplace for voiceover actors and big enterprise brands looking for talent for their campaigns and advertising. But when I joined, they were in the throes of a pretty exciting transition from that marketplace use case to becoming an AI first voice platform. So that was a big draw for me. I have a background in conversational AI. The last two companies that I worked at were in that space. And so I felt like I had a good sense of where the market opportunity was ripest. And I saw what Voices was doing and thought that they were really in an interesting space. And I have a strong belief based on my past experience that voice is really going to dominate AI interaction going forward. And I think if that's the case, people are going to start to reimagine how they're leveraging the power of voice in those instances. So those were really the three big drivers for me. I've heard the concept of we're going towards the voice first era, what does that mean to you and how are we close to it? Yeah. Well, if you think about it, just logically, we connect with one another through our voices. And yet connection today with brands, especially, and you could argue even with other people, happens through typing and texting. We are accustomed to texting our friends. We are accustomed to going online and typing into our computers. But as voice becomes a much more viable channel, that is way more organic for us as human beings. That's what we're accustomed to. I mean, even I think about my own teenage years, I spoke on the phone for hours and hours and hours to my friends. My kids never pick up a phone. They type and text. We're going back to that voice first paradigm because that is more natural for us as humans. It's more expressive. It's more organic. And the technology is getting to a point where it can facilitate a more organic, natural, authentic experience through that channel. So I think that's where we're headed. And I think it's going to be a very fast transition. I've been messing around like most people have with Claude code. And I built this chief of staff that does all of our go to market. And now I don't have to do all of our CRM emails. And it's wonderful. But my problem is being tethered to cloud code. I'm at my computer all of the time. And so one of the features I've been building is a voice mode. So I can interact with my chief of staff. And I think the saying that kids are using is touch grass. I want to be able to go outside and not only have a conversation with my friends, but also to be able to execute my work on using voice. And I think of that as the big interaction change. Are there other ways that brands are using voice similar to mine or are the things that you think are unique? Well, I think there are use cases that are becoming more mature. Certainly in the contact center for customer service. That's a use case we're all familiar with. We all ripped our hair out over those archaic IVR systems that had us pressing one for this and two for that. And now we're all delighted when we get a voice agent that sounds natural and authentic. So I feel like customer service, which is where I come from, that's really the tip of the spear. And they're leading the charge. In-car assistance of voices, we have a lot of customers, automotive customers, because by definition, you have to be hands-free in your car. They are sort of far ahead in this race and have introduced voice experiences that are aligned to their brand identity, that are immersive in many ways. And I think they're really leaning in on that front. And then I think just day-to-day as consumers, we did some research at Voices that showed that overwhelmingly consumers expect to interact with brands using voice. It used to be that the only thing we did was ask Alexa the temperature outside or to set a timer. But increasingly, as the models are becoming more sophisticated, we're leaning on those tools to do more. But most brands haven't yet met that expectation. So I think the number of use cases are going to materially increase in the coming years. What are CMOs underestimating about the shift from, let's call it text-based to voice-based branding? I love that question because I do think in many ways this isn't just a technology shift, it's a brand shift. And I think brand leaders that are thinking about voice or thinking about it through a very different lens. Voice is becoming a part of your brand the same way that your logo, your typography, your color is a foundational part of your brand. If it's true that your customers are going to be interacting with you through your voice increasingly and not through typing and texting, then your voice is a brand identifier. And I think CMOs that lean into that point of view are going to lead the market and really be able to set a standard around brand identity and the importance of voice in ways that others won't be able to catch. Talk to me about who's doing this well. Is there a brand that you think has a specific voice that people recognize? That's a good question. I think we're early days where you would have a single voice that is associated with a brand on the AI side. I mean, certainly we all know the voice of Siri or some of those apps that were used for those more rudimentary activities, but those are inauthentic sounding voices. But I guess I'd answer by saying, you know, I mentioned that Voices has a multi-decade long legacy and traditional voiceover. And certainly there are actors or voices that are associated with brands from a traditional voiceover perspective. And brands go to great lengths to choose those actors and those voices for their campaigns to reflect both their brand identity but also their audience interests So you know I always think of James Earl Jones and the CNN you know that that soundbite that they have or we could come up with others But there are iconic voices that certainly are associated with brands And I do think that that same brand oriented sensibility is going to start to inform how brands choose the voices to front end their AI experiences. It's funny that you say James Earl Jones, because when I was thinking about voices that I recognize and sort of associate with brands, James Earl Jones's voice came up to mind, but I couldn't place the brand. And the second one that came up to mind was Samuel L. Jackson and Capital One with the What's in Your Wallet. Yes. Great. And now I'm like, OK, well, there's a and that's more of like audio, like a sonic branding. It's a tagline. It's advertising driven, but you're not interacting with it. And that's why I'm like, has anybody got past the point where you're like, yeah, OK, Siri. All right. Siri didn't talk in my house. Sometimes I have to look back and make sure it's not listening to my conversations. is a voice we recognize and interact with and maybe Alexa and Google. But outside of the major tech platforms, there's no individual brand who I'm like, yep, I know what you sound like. How do we get to that point? I think it's this shift around how you think about choosing that voice. So in the case of Siri or Alexa or Google, those AI companies created a handful of synthetic voices and that's what they offered to their customers and that's what they used in their apps, but they didn't give a lot of thought to the brand implications and still those voices became familiar and iconic. I think that now that voice is emerging as a default channel for consumer interaction, we are seeing at voices that brands are thinking about this differently. So BMW is one of our customers. When they chose the voices for their in-car experience and they needed multiple voices because they needed different languages, they approached it very much as a brand exercise. They had it, you know, as a luxury automotive dealer, they had a lot of characteristics that they wanted to reflect in that voice experience. And we went and sourced those voices with those characteristics in mind. And so I do think that as brands start to think about it this way, we're going to see a much greater recognition of voices against the brands that they represent. When you talk about BMW and voice selection, I'm imagining a heavy German accent telling you to put your pedal to the metal or something like that. Well, that's not what they went for. They really wanted something that was going to sound luxurious and authoritative and inspire a sense of safety. And they had a whole bunch of qualities that they wanted to inspire in their customer base. And, you know, automotive, that sector is really interesting because they think about the in-cabin experience from a brand perspective. How do the seats feel? What are the acoustics? What do the buttons look like? You know, where is the cup holder? The placement of the logo on the steering wheel. Like, they're very particular about these things. And yet nobody really thought about the voice in that way until very recently. But it's coming. It's coming because, you know, our business is booming. And to me, that is the best market signal in the world that there is appetite to start thinking about voices in this way. Let's talk a little bit about the ethics. And I'll tell you a sad story. We had a podcast for one of the shows we produce where the guest decided he wanted to record on his iPad. And the microphone's too close to the speaker and we got terrible feedback. And we only got a couple seconds where we could actually hear what he was saying. And it was an important guest. So we decided what we were going to do was go to 11 labs, clone his voice, get the transcript of the conversation and then map the synthetic voice over what he was saying and then be like, hey, here's what it actually sounded like when you recorded. Here's the synthetic voice. Are you OK with us using this so we can actually publish the content? And he was like, I didn't when I heard the audio, didn't even realize it wasn't me. It's amazing how realistic some of the AI generated voices can be. But we're also in this environment where you could start to do some potentially nefarious things with people's voice. How do you draw the line between what's innovation, what's misuse? Yeah. I think in some ways the jury's out. There are a lot of people are running with AI and building very exciting apps. And there's a race in play that certainly everyone's trying to win. And so regulation is looming. And there are a lot of cases out there that I think have yet to be resolved. So I think to some extent the jury's out. The way we think about it is that the person behind the voice should have full visibility, consent, they should be well compensated, and they definitely should have some control over how their voice is used. To clarify, you mean the voice actor, not... Voice actor behind that voice. So whatever was used to create that voice, they should get to weigh in on how it's used, how they're paid. And then certainly they should agree to those terms. So we approach every project in that way. I think those are baseline standards for ethics. I also think it protects the brand. When you use an off-the-shelf synthetic voice, there's no guarantee that your competitor isn't going to use the same voice or that voice will get retired because it's not revenue generating enough for the vendor. And so having that visibility, that consent, that agreement with the actor behind the voice protects not just the person, but the brand as well as they lean into voice as brand IP. Voices has stated that they take a human-first AI approach to voice. A, explain to me what that means and how do you position your ethics as a competitive advantage? So I think it comes down to trust. I've only ever worked for companies that are selling into large enterprise, and trust is a true differentiator in an enterprise buying cycle. I think that brand safety is something that everybody is looking out for. And to the extent that we're able to mitigate risks along those lines and give large brands those assurances, it definitely is a differentiator in the market. And I think more and more brands are thinking about not just what does the AI do, but how was it made? What were the inputs? Where did they come from, who agreed to provide that data. And those are all things that we prioritize and think about at Voices. It's very much top of mind in the large enterprise because I think the reputational risks when they don't do these things can be significant. And we're seeing that with some of these lawsuits that are out there. And more and more, we're having these large brands come to us and ask about that governance and about the licensing terms. They don't really want to be involved in those things. They want to know that they can check the box and that they're working with a vendor that has those things in mind. Yeah. The metaphor that comes to mind is, how much do you want to know about what's in the sausages you're eating? Right. And it's like, well, if it's really bad stuff, yeah, I want to know. If it's sourced ethically, then it's a hot dog. It's fine. But talk me through a little bit about the branding side. You mentioned this with BMW, and there's some characteristics that they wanted to replicate, they think are central to their brand. How should marketers think about selecting the right voice for their brand? Yeah. Well, I mentioned this history that we have in traditional voiceover, and this is how we've supported large brands for decades. When they're running these expensive advertising campaigns, they select their voices with great care. And so we have expertise as well as technology to help source the perfect voices for the use cases that they want to support. And we're applying that same expertise and that same technology for AI use cases. So we usually start with a brand calibration exercise where the customer tells us what's important to them. What languages are they looking for? What ages do they want these voices to reflect? What qualities, what styles, what emotional range? Are there specific characters that they want these voices to represent? Depending on the use case, probably wouldn't have characters inside of a BMW car experience, but we get a lot of- with Disney or something. Exactly, yeah, maybe. But you can imagine for like audio books or gaming use cases they get very nuanced around what they want the voice to do how it should sound And that not as simple as just prompting the LLM You need data to train the voice to deliver those outputs And ideally you need data that comes from actors who are trained to say things a certain way and in a way that is authentic. And so the brand calibration exercise helps us to determine what variables we want to use for sourcing the talent who are going to, quote unquote, audition for this job. And that's really the kickoff. You know, then we then we bring them samples and they sort of go through those samples and test them. We might clone a couple of those. And at the end, it leads to a selection. And, you know, we then work on all of the licensing and the government governance and the terms and the contracts with the actors so that the brands don't have to worry about that. And then we deliver all of the audio files that they need in a way that can be immediately ingested into their model. We've QA'd all of that and that's how it works. There's a lot of players in the voice space and I think more and more are coming up pretty rapidly. I mentioned before 11 Labs, obviously voices. Give me a sense of who are the players and what are some of the differences between them in terms of their approaches? Yeah. I don't want to throw any one vendor under the bus and I have great respect for 11 Labs. They're doing some amazing things. They're really blazing the trail. And what they're doing is really creating amalgamated voice. So, you know, lots of inputs and then the output is an amalgam of all of those inputs. We create one-to-one custom voices. So, you know, like the example you gave, the human being sounds one way, the clone sounds exactly the same. So we are cloning individuals. And we think that that gives the brand a much greater sense of access, brandability, if you will, because it's their voice that they can then broadcast to the market. Having access to the actor behind the voice also allows you to evolve that. It also builds consistency because you can use, you know, we had a call today with a client that wants to use the same voice in their advertising campaigns that they are also using. This is a different automotive vendor in their in-car experience. So building that brand consistency is also becoming important. And that is a lot more viable when there's a person behind the voice. So when you think about the market, if you're bought into this idea that you want a single voice to represent your brand, there aren't a lot of folks doing it like we're doing it. There are a few other vendors. Often brands will go to a casting agency if they haven't found us. They'll go the traditional route. Who finds voices? Casting agencies find voices. That's an option, but they don't have the tech background to then deliver the audio files that you need and the quality that you need and to work with the breadth of cloning vendors to actually then clone those voices on your tech of choice. So I would say the options are scarce in the market today. Of course, you can also choose what comes out of the box with the AI vendor that you're using. So if you're using Amazon or Microsoft, you might get a dozen voices out of the box and you can choose one of those. But for all of the reasons that we've discussed, that's a very limiting option. We mentioned before, you mentioned before, customer service. We've all seen voice being used, cars. I think video games is another example. We didn't talk about media. And honestly, this is a little self-serving, but how much do I have to be nervous that people are going to start making podcasts with realistic sounding voices and the humans going to get extracted from this process? Yeah, I think that there is a likelihood that AI will be running podcasts, but it will be your AI. And you will have to very much be in the mix, training that AI, informing that AI, fine-tuning that AI to deliver to the expectation of the customer. We aren't seeing that yet in media and advertising. More so what we're seeing is an appetite for clones to use for pre-production and scratch tracks to accelerate those review cycles so that when the real person does come in to actually deliver, you've got everything else kind of locked in place. But there is for sure an emerging curiosity about how could we turn this market facing and not just for internal use cases. And I think it's coming. I think it's scary. It's very disruptive to the market. But I think what it's going to do is introduce new opportunities for human talent to train these models, to instruct these models, to prompt these models. And you might then just earn passive income from doing that as a podcaster. As much as I have some anxiety about the role of the talking ahead and what happens to them, I did just build a newsletter to voice application where I can, in my inbox, be like, I can't read this newsletter right now. just push it to my podcast feed and it creates a synthetic voice and reads me the newsletter when I go into podcasts. I can see or hear the future of either text to voice or potentially, you know, voice just being extracted as a content channel. I do still think that there is great importance in the understood fidelity of one person talking to each other in this interaction. So hopefully we don't get completely made irrelevant. I am more optimistic, but certainly there are a lot of reasons to be cautious. I like to use the example, and I'm old enough that I remember this happening, when ATMs came to market and there was panic that all of the bank tellers would be out of jobs. And in fact, what happened if you look at that trend over a certain time horizon is that more jobs for tellers came available. They were able to eliminate a lot of the sort of rote work that the automation was able to resolve, which saved money for the bank. So they opened new branches and tellers were then freed up to do more interesting work. So I think we don't know what's on the other side of this. And throughout history, we've seen technology introduce new jobs. And I don't think we know what those are yet necessarily, but I'm optimistic that they're going to start to emerge. I'm in the same camp as you. I have a couple of friends who have called me who don't work in technology and they're like, am I going to lose my job in 12 months? That's what I keep reading. And my position has always been there is as much opportunity as there is risk. So be a adopter, not a laggard, and then you'll find a space in the world. But that's a little bit aside from us talking about voice. I want to ask you one last question, which is how does voices actually market voice in a voice first world? Tell me a little bit about your marketing practice and how you're using voice. I love that question because we're trying to really drink our own champagne, as they say. We're using AI voices for our campaigns. Increasingly, we're trying to leverage AI voice for videos. We're looking at how we can introduce a voice-first experience on our website and inside of our product to help users navigate and to answer their questions more seamlessly. So we're thinking about all of those things and, of course, trying to use voices from voices to front end all of those experiences as well. I think that's logical for you to be on the cutting edge of using voice. And with that said, I want to go into our lightning round where I'm going to ask you MarTech related questions about your background and a little bit about the voice first era. Are you ready? Yep. We're going to call this one my favorite band. What's one marketing lesson from Lady Gaga that every CMO should steal? There are many, just so you know. You're a fan. I got that from our planning meeting. I'm a fan of her music and I'm a fan of her marketing. I'll say this. Lady Gaga once came out in a dress made entirely of raw meat. Do something unexpected that's going to grab people's attention, even if it feels a little bit uncomfortable. Wearing a dress of raw meat It seems very uncomfortable. It does. I think, you know, unique attention grabbing, marketing is good. Was there substance? I guess there's calories and protein in the meat, but how is that type of sort of shocking experience useful? And how do you think about the brand positioning I think you have a nanosecond to make an impression and grab somebody attention It so noisy out there especially in the world of AI And you've got to do something unexpected just to open up the conversation. I don't have any data to validate that the meat dress got Lady Gaga more fans and more downloads of her music. But here I am talking about it more than a decade later. So it definitely stuck in my head. I think the uniqueness point is well taken. And otherwise, it's going to be meat skirts for all. All right, let's move on to our next question. If SEO is dying, what should marketers stop doing today? Stop. I'm going to try to frame the stop as a start. Stop investing all of your SEO budget in SEO. and instead shift it to AI search and start to optimize for AI share of voice. Okay, so stop investing in SEO because it's dying. Start investing in AEO because it's building. But a lot of the practices in SEO and AEO are pretty similar. So am I not doing keyword optimization? What's the actual difference in terms of implementation? Well, I think the macro difference is that you're not trying to drive traffic anymore. It's just going to stop happening. I think the majority of answers served up inside of the LLMs don't even include links. I think I read this week that it was more than 80%. So we shouldn't expect nearly as much website traffic. And if that's the case, how are you writing content? How are you growing brand awareness? How are you driving discoverability inside of that LLM first experience, which, by the way, will be mostly voice led in the future? So there's nobody's going to go to a website. They're going to be asking the LLM in their voice to find answers for them. And you better show up inside of that experience. So we've got to, like, break this, you know, default sensibility around websites. I think it's going away. Yeah, I don't disagree. I think that there'll still be a place for a website and people want to see visual experiences and websites are going to be deprioritized. I don't know if I agree they're going to go away. but uh i i the the click is dying in some capacity right the what you do in your marketing activity driving someone to an experience where they then go to your website and you have trackable information i do think marketers are going to have to start taking a leap of faith and start thinking about brand activities and because the the click isn't necessarily the gold standard of what marketing was successful that got someone into a trackable, nurturable sequence. Well, maybe that's a great way to put it. So the stop or the don't is, you know, stop prioritizing website traffic as your North Star for SEO. Yeah. Scary. Stop counting clicks. Right. All right. What's one way AI is making you as a marketer less effective instead of more? This could be a me thing, but I feel like AI is encouraging people to create these very long, dense documents because you can do that in three seconds. And I'm just a marketing executive that over-indexes on outcomes versus strategy. Strategy is important, but I'm always like restless to get to the action and the outcome. And I'm finding like lots of strategy documents in the organization, in marketing. I can tell that they're AI generated. And I don't object to generating content through AI, but to the extent that it has us spinning on strategy, I think it's slowing us down. sometimes you have to stop building features in the car and make sure that the rubber meets the road and i do think that and i'm a victim of this a little bit myself where my whole plan for this year was to focus on our go-to-market what have i done so far in q1 well i built our brand style guide and i started working on our website and i started building our marketing strategy and figuring out a warm outreach and none of it was actually customer facing i probably could have just put a little bit more heads down, started reaching people and actually driving demand. Well, I guess I'm a victim too. All right, moving on. Last question. You've been a CMO four times. So what's the question every board asks the most that marketers aren't ready for? That's a great question. And I'm not certain that I have a bulletproof answer, although I'm usually ready for the question. And that's, what's the ROI of the marketing investments that we're making? Show me that it's paying off. And that's not an easy one to answer, but marketers have to get very crisp about connecting those dots and they need to be ready for that question. If they can't represent to the board how they're delivering value, and by the way, value means dollars, then they're going to be the first team that's cut when the going gets rough. So I think it's really important that marketing is always anchored on targets and goals that are revenue oriented. Let's talk through that a little bit because I've heard different stances on this where, yes, of course, we need to have an understanding of ROI and our investment, and that's a demand generation component of marketing. But a lot of what we do is making sure that we have brand and awareness, which in theory lowers our cost of acquisition over time, but it's really hard to track. So how do you think about, well, I need to be ROI focused when a lot of my investments now, A, don't drive a click, and B, are meant to get people to know, like, and trust me, not necessarily buy right away? So I think of brand investments as air cover for the revenue targets that we're chasing and some of those more measurable marketing activities like, you know, MQLs and pipeline. But even in the case of brand, establish something that you can measure, something that your CEO and your board can buy into. And it might be outcomes versus outputs. Sorry, it might be outputs versus outcomes. So in the case of PR, for instance, which is often a very costly investment, you might be measuring tier one mentions. In the case of social media, you might be measuring follower growth. But measure something that you can say that you're growing or improving that air cover over time. Now, of course, if those measurements don't correlate to revenue growth, you've got a problem. But at least you're measuring something and then you can make a determination if they're not paying off about how or where you want to cut back based on the data. So be as data oriented as you can. Don't try to boil the ocean. Pick the metrics that are impactful and clear. get buy-in from your CEO, and then report regularly to the board along those lines. I couldn't agree more. You should have something to measure. I also think that not everything should be tied directly to revenue. There are some activities we do that are pre-revenue activities. And us as marketers, mostly on the B2B side, tend to try to push everything towards demand generation. And that's just not really how the best marketing works. That said, Ruth, voice, going back to our original conversation, is something that is coming on fast, strong, hard. It is here. And I appreciate you coming on the podcast and telling us a little bit about how to use voice in our marketing practices. Thank you. My pleasure. This has been a great conversation. All right. That wraps up this episode of the MarTech Podcast. Thanks to Ruth Zive, the CMO of Voices, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Ruth, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com. Or you could visit her company's website, which is Voices.com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or follow us on YouTube. We'll be back every week. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Thanks for listening to the MarTech podcast and I hear everything production looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand. Then visit I hear everything.com.
