As touch became in-conceivable, did the voice remain the last resort to genuine human connection?
Looks like the plain old phone call – I don’t know if you remember it - has made a comeback, taking everyone, even telecom providers by surprise. The volume of phone calls surged more than internet use as people want to hear each other’s voices in the pandemic.
Recent events reminded us of the amazing power human voice has: to cure loneliness and to restore hope worldwide simply by singing a song from a balcony. Just think of how many emojis would make up for that feeling of hearing someone’s smile over the phone.
I can’t help but wonder what this rediscovery of voice, cumulated with the reluctance of touching will have as an outcome. Will radio relive its golden ages? Will our now silent cities evolve differently from an audio point of view? Or will audio triggered commands replace all the touchscreens we no longer want to use?
According to Nielsen, 8 in 10 report more time with radio in March, which makes reconsidering the mix of media mandatory. Even so, we must not fall in the trap of thinking that everything revolving around sound will grow. Music streaming’s lowering audiences showed us that sound alone is not enough. People are searching for connection. One powerful enough to make up for the lost of touch.
This can be a great opportunity to say the stories that we always wanted to say, but that would have cost too much from an image point of view. Amazing creative content might be right around the corner because when people can’t see, they can imagine more.
Author: Roxana Bejinariu
Roxana Bejinariu, Junior Strategic Planner, McCann Bucharest
These are the times when people need to learn from each other more than ever. Times when sharing knowledge is a practice everyone must embrace for the sake of better tomorrows to come. That’s why at McCann Romania, we decided to create a platform where everyone can share their pieces of advice for the industry in different formats. Strategic Hack is the format where experts prove through different perspectives that pretty much anything can be hacked with strategy.
