Hemingwei
One nice thing about Ernest Hemingway's voice AI is that it can speak and read his books in Chinese.
And Korean, French, Japanese, Russian and other languages that the author could not speak when he was alive.
That is why I LOVE this recent work from sister WPP agency Wunderman Thompson for Penguin Audiobooks, which solves a big audience-connect problem in an original, contemporary way.
Thanks to apps like Amazon Audible, more people are listening to more audiobooks than ever.
As a share of media usage, audiobooks currently account for more time spent with audio than streaming music services like Apple Music according to Insider Intelligence.
So what is a 100-year old publisher like Penguin with a huge back catalog of classics in a single language to do to keep the work in circulation?
To stay relevant?
They could do a lot of things, but here's what they DID.
They relaunched a number of backlist titles as audiobooks, read by AI voices trained on the original authors' own voices, in multiple languages.
The first step involved creating a ‘voice library’ for each author by using speech samples collected from recorded interviews by their authors when they were alive.
The voice libraries were trained to unique speech patterns, characteristics and tone, to truly simulate their authors’ voice-ness and then extended to generate in different languages - opening the works to audiences around the world.
To relaunch the works as audiobooks, WT and PA partnered with schools and educators to bring the authors to life in their classrooms.
As digital assets, the voice libraries have many other marketing use cases beyond the books themselves and I am looking forward to seeing where the agency and client go next with them.
One more thing I like about this case is that it widens the aperture as to what an agency partner can do.
One of the Four P's of Marketing is "product".
It is easy to under-estimate the value of pushing an existing product into its next iteration, to serve its next consumer, relative to pushing adoption of the current one. I applaud WT and PA for not taking the easy path.
I hope to find one of these in Audible soon. In Japanese.
If you like it as much as I do, then please watch the case video here. Spoiler alert, although it was made last year, it is presented in the voice of Ernest Hemingway who died in 1961:
