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| Accessories sold separately. |
Commercial TV blazed a new-ish trail, which has since grown fairly ubiquitous with the proliferation of information economies. We all know roughly how it works; rather than selling spectacle to eyeballs for a ticket fee (bread for circuses), commercial TV purveyors first capture wild eyeballs with arresting content, and then on-sell them to the powers behind the spectacle. Rather than buying the shows we want to see, therefore, we instead agree to view them interspersed with advertising we don’t want to see.
This means that in all facets of the commercial television economy, the advertising is what matters – the signal is the noise. In monetary terms, a station outage during 30 seconds of actual programming is far less costly than the same outage which knocks out two 15-second “words from our sponsors”. As viewers we don’t often think of it that way, but that is the hierarchy. While networks will typically offer showrunners the creative freedom required to build compelling programs, any programming which in some way damages the attendant advertising would have to achieve dizzying success to justify its continued existence. Or be on HBO.
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| Buy War Bonds. |
If you keep all that in mind, you might be a bit puzzled when your closed-caption viewing cuts to commercial. Because, truth be told, it’s a little sparse. Plenty of ads with no subtitling, and sometimes the overhanging captions from the program are even allowed to finish up in the ads. So why wouldn’t broadcasters caption what they see as the most important part of the show? Well, it’s all in the unusual background to the captioning business model.
Captioning now is as lucrative as it has ever been. We have cheaper technical and training costs; an ageing Baby Boom generation shifting wealth and political influence onto older (and thus more hearing-impaired) demographics; a recent focus on the impact of closed captions upon literacy, particularly for younger viewers (teach them to read while they watch cartoons); crowd-sourced amateur captioning filling in some crucial accessibility gaps; and hell, even increasing population density, which will probably spark a rise in both muted TVs and tablet-based viewing on crowded trains.
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| They can't all be "working on their novel". |
But this post isn’t about arguing why today’s broadcasters should adopt more thorough captioning policies. Smarter minds than mine are already doing that. My point is that while captioning now makes excellent commercial sense, before it was thus, it was a legal obligation. The recent Ted Talk on caption accuracy gives a useful overview, but basically, large broadcasters were first required to provide closed captioning on just a few prime-time shows, and some news content. Then gradually more and more hours per day, then more of the smaller broadcasters were brought into the fold, then quality standards began to be introduced. A few publicly-funded, inclusively-minded or entrepreneurial broadcasters exceeded their requirements, the rest just waited to be compelled. Or, indeed, fell short and got fined, as ESPN recently were over their audio description.
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| In fairness, some moments truly defy description. |
But despite this tediously slow growth, there are some upsides. The compliance mindset means that captioning is uniquely, compared with broadcasting as a whole, targeted towards what viewers want and need. If you’re a broadcasting corporation doing the bare minimum to satisfy statutory requirements, you won’t go captioning something as superfluous to the requirements as advertising. You’ll be covering programming, starting with the most important.
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| A slayer slays, a captioner watches. |
As it stands, many captioning companies are under large contracts to caption big blocks of programming for their client networks. But advertising is usually left for the brands themselves to ask for and pay for. It’s an interesting financial calculation for them. As ad hoc, one-off captioning jobs, 15 or 30 second ads can be proportionally quite expensive to caption. After all, if you were a broadcasting company with four channels, each of which were captioned 20 hours a day, we could probably cut you a pretty sweet deal for the 560 hours a week of business you’d bring us. But less so if you’re an advertiser with a 15 and a 30 second ad, each of which we’ll caption once, and then replay endlessly for three months. But advertisers want their content seen, it’s how they do, so the increased exposure might be worth the investment. If you’re a small advertiser though, and you want accessible ads, you will have to ask for it. Obviously they have to be captioned offline, as a six or seven second delay would virtually always kill the punchline of an ad. Then again, many ads are designed to be effective even with just audio or just visuals. They reinforce their message in a few semiotic ways – the logo and colour palette, the characters and celebrities, the onscreen slogans, not to mention the products shown, are typically as much a part of the brand as what is being said, and closed captions may at times be superfluous. Our usual gig is reinforcing narrative, but there may indeed not be any narrative to reinforce.
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| There are some exceptions. |
It also means that as live captioners, we treat ad breaks, rather like viewers do, as dead time. We stretch, sip our coffee, chat, cough. We also prepare for the next segment, retrain any words that were playing up in Dragon, hand over to our co-pilots, resolve technical problems. We take a screen-break – I suspect it’s similarly a relief for many captions viewers to be able to stop reading 150 wpm scrolling words on a screen for three minutes, although of course advertising can still represent an important part of the intellectual life of a culture, and universal accessibility may be preferable.
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| All viewers deserve this. |
There is one small additional aspect of captioning in the ad breaks to consider – news updates. Most Australian commercial networks play 30 or 60 second news headlines hourly or half-hourly during ad breaks, along with an increased concentration of them in the lead-up to their newshour. This actually does need to be captioned, as it technically counts as news content, which is singled out by statute as an area of captioning importance. Although it’s only a minute here and there, it can actually be a full-time role. It needs to be prepared for as diligently as any other news, so the captioner of the unrelated program can’t do it. It also typically requires separate headlines for each state or major city, and can be either pre-recorded or live, so the updates captioner remains on her toes.
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| Help! Mila Kunis keeps making me do news updates! |
And with that, I can hear the ad break finishing up. Gotta zip.
Disclaimer.
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