We Once Got Told to "Sound Like You're Eating an Apple Deliciously." Here's What That Taught Us About Voice Briefs
- Marlene Gmeiner
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Every voice director has a story about a bad brief.
Ours involves a luxury car brand, a pretend apple, and a producer we never saw again.
The Brief
A few years ago, we were in the booth for a commercial recording. It was a luxury car brand from Europe. The direction from the producer was simple:
"Sound like you're eating an apple deliciously."
We're not making this up.
Now, a less experienced voice actor might have nodded, picked up the mic, and tried to figure out what "eating an apple deliciously" sounds like in real-time. That's actually what most people do when they receive bad direction - they absorb it, get confused, and start guessing. The result is usually three wasted takes and a tense studio.
Instead, we said: "I don't understand what that means. Could you show me?"
The producer stood up, mimed taking a bite out of a pretend apple, rubbed his stomach, and smiled.
That told us everything we needed to know - not about how to perform the script, but about who we were working with. Some clients are experienced in the booth. Others are not. Both require a different kind of management.
What We Did Instead
Rather than trying to decode the apple metaphor, we offered to read the script three or four different ways - warm and conversational, confident and direct, understated and premium, light and approachable. We gave the client options to react to rather than instructions to interpret.
It worked. We found the right read. The session moved forward.
This is one of the most underrated skills in professional voice direction: when the brief fails you, give the client something to respond to instead of something to explain. Most people are far better at reacting than articulating. A producer who can't tell you what they want can almost always tell you when they've heard it.
Why Vague Briefs Happen (And Why It's Not Always the Client's Fault)
Here's the thing about "natural," "authentic," "energetic," and yes, "eating an apple deliciously" - these words feel like direction. They sound specific enough to be useful. But they mean something completely different to every person in the room.
"Natural" to a brand manager might mean "not too salesy." To a voice actor it might mean "conversational register." To a director it might mean "no performance artifice." These are three entirely different creative decisions.
The client isn't always wrong to use these words. They're describing a feeling, an instinct, a reference point they haven't been given the vocabulary to articulate properly. That's not incompetence - that's just the gap between what a brand experiences emotionally and what a voice director needs technically.
Our job is to close that gap. Not to judge the brief, but to translate it.
When the Language Gap Makes It Twice as Hard
At TooSix, most of our sessions aren't monolingual. We cast and direct voice talent across English, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and more - and here's something that doesn't get talked about enough in the industry: vague briefs don't just travel badly between people. They travel badly between languages.
"Natural" in English and "자연스럽게" in Korean are not the same instruction.
In English-language voice work, "natural" typically signals a move away from theatrical performance - less projection, more intimacy, something that sounds like a real person talking rather than an actor performing. It's a relatively well-understood shorthand in Western commercial production.
In Korean commercial and dubbed content, however, the baseline is different. Korean audiences are accustomed to a higher level of vocal polish and intentional delivery - the domestic animation, gaming, and drama dubbing industries have set a standard over decades that makes "natural" a more complex target. A delivery that sounds natural and unforced to an English-speaking producer can read as underdirected or flat to a Korean listener. The same word, applied in the same booth, produces a completely different result depending on which audience you're producing for.
This gets even more layered with Japanese. Japanese voice direction operates within a deeply codified industry culture - the seiyuu tradition brings with it specific performance conventions, audience expectations, and aesthetic standards that have no direct equivalent in English or Korean production. A brief that says "warm and approachable" in an English-language context might translate into a completely different register in Japanese depending on the character's social position, the formality of the scene, and the specific honorific level the script requires.
We've sat in sessions where a client provided a single brief in English and expected it to function as direction across all three languages simultaneously. It never does. What a brief means in one language has to be actively translated - not just linguistically, but culturally and performatively - for each target market.
This is the part of multilingual voice production that most agencies and brands don't account for until they're already in the middle of a session wondering why the Korean take sounds different from the English one even though they used the same direction. They did use the same direction. That was the problem.
The solution isn't a longer brief. It's a smarter one - built around audience and context rather than feeling and instinct, and revisited separately for each language before the session begins.
The One Question Every Brand Should Ask Before Writing a Brief
If we could give every client one piece of advice before they write a creative brief, it would be this:
Who is the target audience?
Not the product. Not the tone. Not the vibe. The audience.
Because once you know who you're talking to - their age, their relationship to the brand, whether they're being sold to or welcomed in, whether they're experts or newcomers - everything else follows. The register, the pace, the warmth or authority in the voice, the emotional distance or intimacy of the delivery. All of it comes from the audience.
A brief that says "our target audience is Korean women aged 25–35 who already use the product and trust the brand" gives a voice director infinitely more to work with than "make it sound natural."
And if you're producing across multiple languages? Answer that question separately for each market. The audience for your English campaign and the audience for your Korean campaign are not the same person, even if they're buying the same product. The voice that speaks to one may not speak to the other - and a brief that ignores that difference will produce results that sound slightly off in at least one language, even if nobody in the session can immediately explain why.
What to Do When You're in the Booth With a Bad Brief
Whether you're a voice actor, a director, or a brand manager sitting in on a session, here's what actually works:
Ask for clarification without apology. "I want to make sure I give you exactly what you need - can you tell me more about what that means to you?" is a professional question, not a sign of weakness. The producer in our luxury car brand session wasn't embarrassed to mime biting an apple. You shouldn't be embarrassed to ask what they meant by it.
Ask for a reference. A piece of music, another ad, a tone of voice from a show or film, even a specific person whose voice carries the right quality. References bypass the vocabulary problem entirely. When a client says "I want it to sound like that," the direction is suddenly specific - even if it still takes skill to execute.
Offer options. Read it three ways. Let the client react. You'll find the answer faster than any amount of back-and-forth description, because most people are far better at recognizing what they want than articulating it in advance.
For multilingual sessions specifically: brief each language separately, even if the core creative concept is the same. Take ten minutes before the session to walk through how the direction applies to that specific language and that specific audience. It saves far more than ten minutes in the booth.
And if all else fails - if the direction is truly, genuinely incomprehensible - do what works. Offer your best professional read. Most clients, when they hear something that actually sounds good, will recognize it immediately even if they couldn't have described it in advance.
The apple was pretend. The lesson was real.
TooSix Media Group is a multilingual voice casting agency and professional recording studio based in Seoul, South Korea. We've been in the booth long enough to have heard every brief imaginable - and a few that weren't. If you're planning a multilingual voice campaign and want to make sure your brief actually works across languages, get in touch.
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