Commercial voice over
Professional commercial voice over services
Thirty seconds is not much time to earn attention, deliver a message and make it stick. Everything in a commercial works against the clock, and the voice carries more of that weight than any other element. Viewers forgive average visuals far more readily than they forgive a read that sounds like an ad trying too hard.
A professional Commercial Voice Over is what makes those seconds count. At GoLocalise, we cast and record voices for TV, radio, online video and social campaigns, matching the read to your brand, your audience and the media plan behind the spot.
- Voices cast for the audience you are buying media against, not just for how good the demo sounds
- Reads timed to the frame, whether the cut is six seconds for social or sixty for cinema
- Usage rights scoped and cleared for your exact channels, territories and campaign duration
- Translation and localisation in-house for campaigns running in more than one market
Explore some examples of our Commercial Voice Over Artists
Every commercial demo sounds confident. The real test is how a voice performs inside an actual spot, against music, sound design and a ticking clock, and whether it still sounds like the brand on the hundredth airing.
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How our commercial voice over services work
Tight deadlines are the natural habitat of advertising, so our process is built to move quickly without skipping steps. Every spot follows the same structured workflow, coordinated by a dedicated project manager:
Brief review
Translation
Voice casting
Studio recording
Audio editing
Quality assurance
Feedback & revisions
Ready to air
Casting, direction, recording and delivery all run through one team. That is how a Commercial Voice Over arrives on deadline, on brief and ready to air.
Why choose a professional commercial voice over?
Advertising is one of the few formats where the audience did not ask to hear you. A commercial interrupts something the viewer actually wanted, which means the voice has about two seconds to justify staying. Professional commercial talent earns that permission with craft: where to lean in, where to pull back, how to sell without sounding like selling.
Media spend raises the stakes well beyond the recording itself. When a campaign carries serious budget behind it, the voice over is a rounding error in the production cost but a major factor in whether the spot performs. Saving money on the read is economising on the one element every single impression contains.
Commercial work is also legally fussier than most voice over. Broadcast clearance, talent usage terms, renewal windows and territory restrictions all need managing, and getting them wrong can pull a campaign off air. We handle that layer as standard, so your media plan never collides with your talent contract.
And campaigns evolve. The thirty-second hero spot becomes a fifteen, a six, a radio cut and a year-two refresh with new offers. Booking through GoLocalise keeps the same voice available and consistent across every version, so the campaign sounds like one idea rather than a series of compromises.
Commercial formats & delivery
Everything cut to time and cleared for use — across TV, radio, online and social.
- Durations
- 6″, 15″, 30″ and 60″ cutdowns from one session.
- Audio formats
- Broadcast WAV or MP3 to your platform's spec.
- Usage & licensing
- Priced by media, territory and term — and cleared for use.
- Versions
- TV, radio, online and social versions kept voice-consistent.
- Turnaround
- Most commercials delivered within 24–48 hours.
- Languages
- Native reads for every market, 100+ languages.
How to choose the right commercial voice over
Start from the media plan, not the voice. A spot built for TV prime time, a pre-roll skippable after five seconds and a radio ad live in drive time each reward different reads, and a voice brilliant in one can disappear in another.
Then define the read style the creative needs. Hard-sell urgency, conversational warmth and understated storytelling are different skills, and most voice talent is stronger in some than others. Listening to demos against your actual script, rather than in isolation, shows the difference quickly.
Finally, settle the usage conversation before recording, not after. Channels, territories and campaign duration shape both the price and the contract, and renegotiating them mid-campaign always costs more than scoping them properly at the start.
When we cast commercial work at GoLocalise, these are the four areas we recommend resolving first
Read style: hard sell, conversational or storytelling
Fit with your target audience
Experience across TV, radio and digital formats
Usage rights and campaign scope
Commercial voice over pricing & project options
Commercial voice over pricing has its own logic: the recording session is only part of the cost, and usage usually matters more. A spot airing nationally on TV for a year is priced differently from the same script running two weeks on social, even when the studio time is identical. That is why we quote per campaign rather than per package. The tiers below are reference points showing how commercial projects of different scopes typically come together:
Bronze
For a single-market spot with a final script, recorded by the right professional voice. Includes:
- Professional commercial voice over recording
- Audio editing and clean-up
- Delivery in the format your channel requires
Silver
For campaigns entering a new market, with the script adapted before recording. Includes:
- Script translation and localisation by native linguists
- Professional commercial voice over recording
- Audio editing and clean-up
- Delivery reviewed against your target market
Gold
For campaigns publishing across platforms with accessibility covered. Includes:
- Script translation and localisation
- Professional commercial voice over recording
- Audio editing and clean-up
- Subtitles supplied in SRT format
Custom projects
A campaign in eight markets with staggered launch dates? Cutdowns, tags and seasonal refreshes through the year? Specific broadcast usage to clear? Most commercial work looks like this, so tell us the plan and we will quote around it.
Get a tailored quote for your projectCommercial voice over for multilingual and global campaigns
A global campaign lives or dies on a strange balancing act: the big idea must stay recognisable everywhere while sounding native everywhere. Ship the original voice with subtitles and you lose impact; recast carelessly market by market and you lose the campaign.
GoLocalise manages that balance from the centre. One brief and one project manager cover every market version, with casting, direction and delivery held to the same standard from the lead market to the smallest buy.
Carefully selected voice talent for each market
Advertising trades on familiarity, and nothing breaks it faster than a voice that sounds imported. Humour, energy and persuasion all land differently from one market to the next.
For each language in the campaign, we shortlist native commercial talent who match the brief and the local audience, and you sign off every voice before the sessions begin.
The result is a campaign that feels locally made in every market it runs.
One campaign sound across languages
The audience in each market hears only their version, but the brand team has to live with all of them. Versions that drift apart in tone quietly pull the campaign apart with them.
We direct every market’s talent against the lead spot and shared references, keeping energy, pacing and attitude aligned across languages.
Line up all the versions afterwards and they sound like one campaign. That is the test, and it is the one we produce for.
Centralised production and quality control
Multi-market campaigns multiply deadlines, file specs and approval rounds. Spread across local suppliers, they multiply risks too. We keep the whole programme inside one workflow instead.
Every version passes linguistic and technical QA, including timing against the picture, before it is delivered.
You receive air-ready files for every market, cleared, consistent and on the agreed schedule.
Trusted to deliver by the world top brands
Click a logo to watch the work we delivered for them.
What our happy customers say
We have used GoLocalise on a regular basis for projects in a number of languages. The service we receive is great. The team is always friendly and professional. The voiceovers we receive are of a very high quality and the turnaround is extremely quick. We are very happy to recommend GoLocalise to other businesses.
We’ve worked with the GoLocalise team on countless video projects and have always had the same consistent, great experience. Not only are they responsive and quick on turnaround, I can always trust the VO will be done right – they are always 100% clear with communication and ensure their talent is prepared to record by asking necessary questions upfront before recording. Highly recommended and will definitely work with them on future projects.
It was a pleasure to work with David and the team at GoLocalise. David gave me lots of help and advice, guiding me through my first subtitling project. He really knows his stuff! The experience was completely pain-free. I would not hesitate to recommend GoLocalise – outstanding work at a good price.
They’re reliable, adaptive and obsessed with quality. And while you can never be 100% guaranteed of perfection, you can be sure GoLocalise will go the extra mile to get it right every time. Whether that’s hiring extra resources, hopping on multiple calls or even changing their internal processes, they’ll do what it takes. We’ve worked with them now for over to 5 years and we are truly thankful to have such a strong localisation partner for our business.
Plan your commercial voice over
Useful guides and tools for pricing, scripting and licensing your commercial.
Voice over rates & usage
How commercial voice over is priced — session fees versus usage licensing.
View ratesUsage fees & buyouts explained
What broadcast, online and cinema usage actually costs, and how buyouts work.
Read the guideCommercial script samples
Real ad scripts across sectors to shape and time your own spot.
See examplesUsage-fee calculator
Estimate broadcast and media usage for your campaign and territories.
Estimate usageLanguages
Commercial voice over in your language
Take your ad global with native voices your audience trusts. A few of our most-requested languages are below — we record in 100+.
- Afrikaans
- Arabic
- Assamese
- Bengali
- Bulgarian
- Cantonese
- Catalan
- Chinese Mandarin
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English Africa
- English UK
- English US
- Estonian
- Filipino
- Finnish
- Flemish
- French European
- German
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Malay
- Norwegian
- Persian (Farsi)
- Polish
- Portuguese Brazilian
- Romanian
- Russian
- Serbian
- Sesotho
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish European
- Spanish Latin American
- Swedish
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Vietnamese
- Welsh
- Zulu
We record in over 100 languages
Can't see the one you need? We almost certainly cover it.
FAQs
It is the recorded voice in an advertisement, from TV and radio spots to online video and social ads. The job combines performance with precision: selling the message convincingly inside an exact number of seconds.
Professional voice over services for your audio and video productions
Voice over
- State-of-the-art studios
- Neumann microphones
- On-hand sound engineers
- 1,000+ voice actors
Translation
- 100+ languages covered
- Tailored to your needs
- Stringent quality control
- Dedicated project managers
Subtitling
- Experienced subtitlers
- Industry-standard software
- Burn-in and graphic editing
- Open and closed captions
Transcription
- Improve accessibility
- Reach a wider audience
- Boost SEO and video views
- Maximise video engagement