Diageo’s approach to ad accessibility

09/10/2024

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egta spoke to Sarah Sorrenson, Global Head of Media, Diageo to explore how Diageo embraces ad accessibility in their campaigns and across their assets.

At Diageo, we are committed to nurturing the most inclusive and diverse culture, as well as shaping market-leading policies and practices because it is both the right thing to do and helps our business to grow. This is core to our purpose of “celebrating life every day everywhere”. For our marketing, this means using our brands to shatter stereotypes and celebrate diversity. From script to screen, we want everyone to see themselves represented across gender, race, sexuality, disability, age, social status and more, and we’re committed to using our media investment to ensure the media landscape is representative and inclusive of the society we live in. Diageo is committed, as part of the Accessibility Alliance, to making our communications as accessible as possible and to drive industry change alongside other Alliance members.

Sarah Sorrenson
Global Head of Media
Diageo

Over the last 18 months we have launched pilots implementing closed captions, audio descriptions and alt text across brand campaigns in key European markets to better understand how to meet the needs of people with hearing and sight impairment within our marketing. Our Baileys brand partnered with the Royal National Institute for the Blind to raise the bar on alt text and image descriptions creating ‘Delicious Descriptions’ for our Baileys Social with this functionality now live on all Baileys campaigns. We created a playbook in partnership with Meta of description strategy and language guidance which is now available for other brands to use.

Guinness will never settle until everyone feels as though they can belong in rugby. However, our research revealed that 71% of the blind and visually impaired community engage with sport through TV and radio but are not able to fully experience the game at home with standard commentary and subtitles. Guinness leveraged its partnership with ITV in Great Britain to make sporting history by trialing live descriptive audio commentary for two games during the Guinness Men’s Six Nations 2024.

Our next steps are focused on rolling out the Diageo Accessible Marketing Playbook across our global brands implementing accessibility features across our assets and continuing to advocate with media partners. We’re constantly learning and striving to do more, and we will continue to work to make our marketing as accessible as possible, ensuring that everyone feels included in the celebrations.