Super Bowl Advertisers Ignore Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons

Editor: Some things clearly make perfect sense the minute you see them; some are uncertain; some clearly make NO sense. The captioning of television advertising clearly falls in the third category. Television ads are amazingly expensive to produce, and the cost to purchase time on the major networks is astronomical, especially during events like the Super Bowl. Not captioning any television ad is economic insanity, and that goes triple for Super Bowl ads.

The cost to produce a 30-second television ad is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost of broadcasting that ad during the Super Bowl was $2.4 million. So for something like $2.5 million dollars, an advertiser's message was available to about 117 million people (Of the estimated 130 million who watched it, an estimated 90% or 117 million were able to hear and understand the spoken message.) That's a cost per consumer of about two cents.

The cost to caption that 30-second commercial is about $250, and the captioning makes the commercial accessible to the 13 million people who are unable to understand the spoken message. So how many of these consumers does the advertiser reach for the two cents he spent on a single hearing consumer? You better sit down! The answer is over 1000! By that measure, the return on the money an advertiser spends on captioning is over 1000 times the return on the money he spends on producing and broadcasting the commercial! Yet, less than half of the Super Bowl commercials were captioned!

OK, enough from me. I'm getting off the soapbox, and Cheryl Heppner of NVRC is getting on. Here are her thoughts from the February 12 edition of NVRC News.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For me, part of the whole spectacle of watching the Super Bowl each year is seeing what cool, crazy and creative new commercials will appear. In my opinion, if they are going to interrupt the main event so often, they should be spectacular.

It's hard to judge the quality of the ads I saw during the 2005 Super Bowl. I was stunned by how many did not have captions; it seemed like far less than last year. I felt like I was at a party where I largely saw the jokes and didn't get the punch line.

captions.com confirmed my impression on Monday. Each year they monitor the commercials during the Super Bowl to tally which have captions and which do not. Their website claims that a 30-second commercial costs $2.4 million, and the cost to caption an ad of that length was just $250.

I took a look at their list, and sure enough there were more ads without captions than with them. Ford and Pepsi both had four commercials and didn't caption any of them. Doesn't it make you wonder if their marketing people are really ignorant, or whether they don't think we have any buying power? Or perhaps their advertising agencies aren't very savvy?

You can find the list of who's been bad and who's been good at: http://www.captions.com/superbowl_content_frame.html

captions.com has provided links for many of the advertisers on the list so you can praise them or chide them.