Closed 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 an ad may fail to clear and can remain sticky with the remainder of the broadcast.
The following broken closed caption images are from a television in a local sandwich shop. The TV was tuned to Fox News and had this one single caption locked in place for the entire time I sat eating. Broken TV? Broken transmission network? Broken ad? Broken Fox News?
Posted on March 24th, 2008
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!
