egta spoke to Taide Guajardo, Chief Brand Officer Europe at P&G on the evolution of the conversation around accessible advertising, recent progress and the critical next steps needed to remove barriers to advertising to ensure that ads truly reach and can be consumed by all.
Taide Guajardo (TG): Every new industry player that has been made aware has reacted positively to the opportunity to delight more consumers with accessible advertising. With 15% of the population experiencing some kind of disability and the perspective of a growing aging population, this becomes an important force for growth and for good. We have driven mass awareness with participation in several conferences, articles and personal connections. This has led the creation and evolution of a small coalition of the willing where P&G, EGTA, RNIB, EACA initiated a conversation with WFA, and brought in more advertisers and publishers, evolving now to a more formal ISBA led, WFA backed, Advertising Accessibility alliance for Europe. It has impulsed our power to engage taking us to more stages in Cannes and having more advertisers, agencies and publishers embrace this. Our key focus is to make our advertising accessible to people with viewing and hearing impairments, by including Audio Description and Open/Closed captioning.
Taide Guajardo
Chief Brand Officer
P&G Europe
egta: What significant milestones or changes have you observed in this period?
TG: Beyond the awareness progress done with the efforts from the Advertising Accessibility alliance, we have progressed on key priorities.
We have seen more structural measurement being made with the help of Extreme reach, providing a factual departure point for the industry in terms of audio description and captioning. This showed the opportunity as the estimate is that only 17% of ads have any accessibility feature. It helps rally the action and also drive accountability on the progress.
At P&G, we are closing our Fiscal year with, approximately 4 out of 5 assets are delivered with captions, be it open captioning, close captioning or supers across Europe. 1 in 3 TV adverts delivered with Audio Description in the markets where AD is available from broadcasters. This doesn’t take into account ads that have been designed with an understandable voice over, providing sufficient details for someone with a visual impairement to understand.
We fielded research confirming that 65% of consumers would like accessible advertising as they claim it will enable them to learn about their choices and feel more included.
We would like to call out the following publishers for making progress in their offering to enable accessible advertising thanks to close collaboration:
- In digital, Meta has been trailblazing with relentless push to adapt their offerings from a technical standpoint. Key available features are closed captions auto & editing, Image Alt Text auto & editing and Audio-Description on organic and paid videos on FB and IG (all video formats).
- In TV, this past year we had several more broadcasters enabling AD on advertising. In Italy, RAI enable AD and now 100% of our brands (Viakal, Gillette, OralB, Venus and Zzzquil) are airing ads with AD. In Greece, ANT1 leveraged the World Accessibility Day on May 16th to announce AD capabilities launch on the network. The activation was combined with an awareness campaign were some of our ads were blurred for people to experience TV as someone with a visual impairment. Since that day, all of our ads on ANT1 are being aired leveraging AD. In France, TF1 was the first broadcaster to partner with us and launch accessible advertising across its network in 2021. Since then, M6, Canal+ and France TV followed the movement. In Germany, we partnered with ZDF and ARD to launch accessible advertising on their network earlier on this year with 55 of our TVC being aired with AD and CC enabled.
egta: What challenges do you still face in making all advertisements fully accessible?
TG: We continue to drive on the priorities identified: drive awareness, codify the best practices, get equipped with the technology needed to allow for audio description. The operational part is not expensive but can be streamlined to be incorporated as a standard in every piece of communication developed. The prospect of technology helping us find easier solutions, for example, the work done by WPP to leverage Gen AI to create the audio descriptions in a fast an automatic way, is promising.
egta: How do you plan to address these challenges in the coming years? How do you measure the impact of accessible advertising on your audience and business outcomes?
TG: As P&G we are embedding accessible advertising as the standard expectation for all advertising. We need to get more publishers embracing the technology and more agencies embracing this as the departure point and we expect the Accessible Alliance will play a strong role on this. The measurement on business is explained by the incremental reach we get from our advertising being understood by a larger part of the population.
egta: What reasons do we have, as an industry, to be hopeful when it comes to accessibility?
TG: The business need is the more obvious reason why we should drive action, and at the same time, the impact on society. This is a low hanging fruit that any advertiser can embrace and make the standard.