Thierry — voiceover or not?

Turn your sound on. Both versions are matched to within 1 dB so you are judging the voice, not the volume — a louder file always sounds “better” otherwise. Worth remembering the site autoplays muted, so most visitors never hear either.

Alderwick Plumbing

No voiceovermusic only

With voiceovervoice

“A slow drain is the symptom. The cause is further down, in the line under your yard. So we put a camera in it. Roots, a crack, a collapse. You see it the same second we do.”

v2. The first draft said “it’s out here” — pointing at nothing, since the viewer has only seen a sink — and referenced “your membership” before any membership had been introduced. Both were the same error: assuming context the viewer doesn’t have. Every noun now points at something already on screen, and the membership is left to the end card, where a new fact can be stated rather than assumed.

Hartmere Electric

No voiceovermusic only

With voiceovervoice

“An extension cord under the garage door isn’t a charging point. We fit the proper one — mounted, wired, tested. Then you just plug in and walk away. Hartmere Electric.”

How I wrote them

The voice adds, it never reads the screen aloud. Where the overlay says “It starts underground”, the voice says why that matters. Narrating the same words twice is the usual way voiceover makes an ad worse.
Sparse on purpose. Roughly half of each ad is silent — 11.8s of speech in the plumbing cut, 10.8s in the electrical. It should breathe, not talk over itself.
No invented numbers. The obvious line was “nine times out of ten the problem is underground”. I cut it — a spec ad still shouldn’t model a made-up statistic.
The music ducks under the voice automatically, so nothing fights.

Voiceover, or no voiceover?

Alderwick Plumbing

Hartmere Electric

How I wrote them