Closed Captioning Ads
Quick question: why do so many advertisers not close caption their TV ads? While eating in a noisy restaurant the other day, I noticed the ubiquitous TV-tuned-to-ESPN had been muted with the captioning turned on. While the broadcast was close captioned, probably only about 30% of the ads were.
For advertisers, the economics of actually close captioning an ad should be a total no brainer! It’s a 30 second static piece of footage that may only rarely change between markets. It can’t be that expensive to get someone to type a page or two of text into the captioning system! Yet the number of people who are watching who would still see your ad, either because they are deaf or because they happen to be watching in bars or restaurants, is probably quite large.
Unless someone can tell me why these economics don’t add up, I’m inclined to believe it’s pure laziness; and that’s a total shame. For the amount of money spent on making an ad campaign, it strikes me as incredibly odd that nobody thinks of the strategy behind captioning it.
And if that’s not convincing, think of it this way. People who are watching TV and reading your ad are guaranteed to be paying attention to it! While their numbers are few, their attention is assured. Reach out to them!
My only guess is that people think it might interfere with the visuals of the ad. It does seem odd, though.
At least when some of the Deaf groups publish their criticisms about the companies that don’t caption superbowl ads, the excuse often comes down to timing — ads being completed very close to the deadline. I think that’s a pretty weak excuse.
On the more believable side, sometimes there is the issue of captions for the broadcast show being done live, mostly for news or sports. From http://www.ncicap.org/FAQ1.asp
“Why do captions sometimes disappear during commercial breaks?
When a program is being captioned live and reaches a commercial break or the end of the program, the captioner must send a command to enable the encoder that is processing the captions to accept other data. If the captioner neglects to send this enabling command when finishing the captioning of a segment or program, the captions on the next commercial or program will not be able to access the encoder, and will not appear. The technical staff at the broadcast site must be alert for this situation. Also, the commercials themselves might not be captioned.”
Also, I’ve heard that captioning costs are about $200 per commercial, more if it’s a rush job.
$200!?! That’s nothing compared to the cost of producing a 30 second commercial. No advertiser in their right mind should skip captioning their ad.
As for the encoder issue, that sounds like a poorly designed technology problem. I wonder how easy that would be to fix…?
[...] captioning on television is just plain broken. I wrote before asking why advertisers don’t add captions to their ads, but today I realized the opposite problem can *cough* arise. Sometimes a caption from [...]