The advertising sector has been on a long journey towards accessibility. Four decades since the introduction of live subtitles on British television, most ads delivered in the UK are still not being subtitled. A Clearcaststudy in Q1 2025 showed that one in four advertisers did not intend to subtitle their TV ads, despite wide support for making advertising more accessible to consumers.
As Cannes Lions draws to a close, there is hope that the tide may finally be turning. In the Design and Digital Craft categories, FCB Chicago scooped the Grand Prix at the festival for its ‘Caption with intention’ campaign for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The campaign, which followed 10 months of research with the d/Deaf community, took closed captioning to another level. Animated on-screen text is closely synchronised with speech and displays ‘intonation, different characters and volume of voice through bold lettering and colour’.
The FCB campaign spotlights the potential for accessible advertising to both improve the viewing experience of the deaf community and to drive memorability among the broader population. But while advanced closed captioning offers new potential for bold advertising, much of the industry continues to forego even the most basic form of subtitling in its ads.
Initiatives are underway to change this. Earlier this year, Channel 4 announced its aim for closed captioning to be available on all campaigns on its airtime by 2026. This follows accessibility initiatives by the public broadcaster during last year’s Paralympic Games – targets that were ultimately not met after 40% of advertisers failed to deliver on captioning for creative assets.
The industry has a responsibility to meet the needs of the UK’s d/Deaf community, who number some 18 million people with varying degrees of hearing loss. However, as proprietary research from the7stars has shown, it is not just the d/Deaf community who stand to benefit from closed captioning in adverts. According to the7stars’ Power of Words, released in collaboration with Differentology and Walr, 61% of 18-24-year-olds prefer to read text while watching video content.
This is a win-win for brands: the age demographic least likely to be affected by hearing loss stands to benefit alongside the quarter of UK adults who are among the deaf community.
Under controlled A/B testing methodology, ads with subtitles drew a 3%pt. increase in brand salience and consideration, and a 4%pt. increase in likeability – uplifts which were even more pronounced among 18-34s. While basic subtitles can be beneficial for brands, campaigns which seamlessly incorporated captioning into their creative – such as Cunard – stood to gain the most.
For advertising to truly become accountable, accessibility concerns will need to be addressed. While subtitling should be a simple step for brands to reach the d/Deaf community more effectively, the benefits to brand salience of incorporating seamless subtitles outweigh concerns about the cost of captioning. Perhaps, more than four decades on from the first live subtitles on Great British telly, we will soon finally have a country in which all can experience our content.
