With the support of industry bodies Thinkbox, the Advertising Association, ISBA, the IPA and the British Arrows, our ‘Accessible ads for all’ Campaign launched on 3rd March, World Hearing Day 2023.
We have a range of exciting initiatives up our sleeve but to kick off proceedings, today we’re asking the industry to complete a short survey to understand how people feel about the topic and existing practices.
It’s estimated that 7.5 million people in the UK use subtitles for TV programmes, so it’s clear that improving accessibility in TV advertising is not only a societal responsibility, but also an opportunity and including them can widen audience reach by millions.
We’re best known for clearing ads in the UK and enabling brands to advertise responsibly on TV and VOD platforms.
We also play a wider role in the world of advertising and an example of this is our commitment to making TV and VOD ads more accessible, made possible through recent conversations with RNID (the charity supporting people who are deaf, have hearing loss and tinnitus) and various industry bodies. As far as we know, there’s currently no centralised record of how many TV and VOD ads in the UK contain subtitling, but this is something we can help with.
Our aims around accessible ads are:
- To increase awareness about the unknown levels
- To understand more about current practices and possible barriers
- To encourage more reporting within the industry
- To encourage advertisers and agencies to make more ads accessible
The survey closes on April the 18th and we’ve enlisted the help of independent media market research professional Sue Gray, who will supply us with the anonymous data analysis, which we’ll share in early May.
If you have any questions or want to know more about the campaign, get in touch.
