The Super Bowl and its commercials grabbed the attention of more than 90 million viewers and raked in truck loads of money as commercials went for as much as $2.7 million per 30-second slot, creating the biggest sports-marketing event of the year. While most of the commercials erred on the side of caution to avoid stepping on any toes, most "forgot" to close-caption them for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.
Check out DiversityInc's take on the best and worst ads of Super Bowl XLII and tell us what you think.
According to research by Cheryl Heppner, executive director of the Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons, more than 80 of the counted 109 commercials lacked closed captioning.
"Far too many companies still do not understand what a big audience they are missing and how many of us like to do business with companies that reach out to us," Heppner said.
Of the 109 ads viewed, 78 were not captioned, 21 were captioned, five were not captioned but had neither speaking nor singing, three were not captioned and had singing but lacked speaking, one was not captioned but had the sound of a dog lapping water, and one used jumbled letters.
"Sometimes there were long stretches of ads with no captions," Heppner said. So who got it right?
According to Heppner, Sprint Nextel Corp. (No. 28 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity® list), Ford Motor Co. (No. 5) and McDonald's Corp. were the only companies during the pre-show to have closed-captioned commercials.
During the actual game, Coca-Cola (No. 4), JPMorgan Chase (No. 9), Bud Light, GoDaddy.com, Cars.com, Tide to Go, Budweiser, GMC, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Toyota (one of DiversityInc's 25 Noteworthy Companies), and FedEx made the honor roll for their advertisements, which had closed captioning.
PepsiCo, No. 10 on the Top 50 list, created a silent ad for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community during the pre-game show. This ad was developed by PepsiCo's employee-resource group for employees with disabilities.
Below is an e-mail DiversityInc received from Dr. Roy Kulick, referring us to a blog, which caused us to check out this story.
Super Bowl Ad Captioning Costs
From Shane Feldman's blog:
I asked a captioning company approximately how much it would cost to caption a 30 or 60 second Super Bowl ad. Here's their response:
For broadcast captioning, if we got the media in a digital format and just had to deliver a standard caption file, we would generally do it for $200-250. It could be less if there are multiple segments or if it were bundled with other work. The issue is with project management and setup time to do such a short segment. Though honestly it only take a few minutes to do the actual captioning work, it takes time to get the media, load the media, save it, transfer it, communicate with the client, answer any questions, etc. etc. :-)
We generally try to be very cost competitive so that pricing is not the true issue. In fact, with the captioning component, we find more
frequently that there are technical issues that are more of a barrier than the cost alone. This could be on their production side (the spot isn't ready till the absolute last second, and there's no time to caption and master it), or on the broadcast side (they aren't easy to interface with to broadcast the captions for the commercials), or lack of interest (they don't feel 'obligated' to caption the commercial).
Read more atDeafDC.
Captioned or Not Captioned?
On a listserv that I participate in, a Texas resident who saw the NVRC article wrote that the Bridgestone Tires ads were all captioned. Yet here in Virginia, Pat, Dick and I did not see any captions. On Tuesday, I found that the person behind Captions.com's Super Bowl Commercial Review had posted a list of captioned and not captioned commercials for 2008, which lists Bridgestone Tires as one of the captioned ads.
He also listed ads from Famous Dave's, QuitPlan, IdeaCast.com, Dairy Queen, Jimmy John's Subs, Logitech Harmony Remote, Arbys and Comcast that we did not see here in Northern Virginia. This confirms my suspicion that some ads were regional placements. There were other discrepancies in his list and ours.
As an example, for Ford NVRC reported 1 of 2 ads captioned; Captions.com reported 0 of 2 ads captioned. Doritos' ad and the SoBe Life Water ad were listed by Captions.com as having captions but NVRC reported their ads had no speaking or singing. Yet Amp, Dell and Gatorade ads, which also had no speaking or singing, were listed as not captioned. Dell appears on both Captions.com's captioned and not captioned list.
Getting in Touch with Advertisers
Captions.com's list of captioned and not captioned ads has links for some companies so you can click to contact them. We list them below with notes from NVRC's scorecard.
Dell (no speaking/singing)
SoBe Life Water (no speaking/singing)
Anheuser Busch (4 of 6 ads)
Planters (no speaking, but had singing)
Doritos (no speaking or singing)
Dell (also appears on their captioned list)
Anheuser-Busch - Bud Light, Budweiser (also appears on captioned list)
Doritos (also listed as captioned)
©2008 by Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons (NVRC), 3951 Pender Drive, Suite 130, Fairfax, VA 22030; NVRC.org; 703-352-9055 V, 703-352-9056 TTY, 703-352-9058 Fax. Items in this newsletter are provided for information purposes only; NVRC does not endorse products or services. You do not need permission to share this information, but please be sure to credit NVRC. This news service is free of charge, but donations are greatly appreciated. To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your email address, or report problems, contact cheppner@nvrc.org.
