Clearcast’s #AdsForAll Campaign – Winner of the Social Impact Award
20 March 2025
The Best Practice Awards, held every two years, celebrate innovation and excellence in the field of advertising self-regulation. Each month, we will shine a spotlight on a different winning entry. This month, we feature Clearcast (UK), which earned the first prestigious Social Impact EASA Best Practice Award for its #AdForAll Campaign.
Supporting diversity by enhancing the accessibility of TV ads
In November 2022, Clearcast launched the #AdsForAll Campaign to address the need for accessible TV ads in the UK. By “accessible ads”, we mean ads that can be understood by people with various needs. Due to its previous experience with subtitles (Clearcast offers a subtitling service), they decided to focus efforts on subtitles.
The driving factor that led Clearcast to work on this project was the need to tackle the exclusion of people with hearing loss from experiencing advertising in the UK, which in turn posed a significant issue of social inclusion. Clearcast’s ambition was to encourage the industry to produce more accessible ads to tackle the challenge of social inclusion while also giving brands the opportunity to widen their audience. Their campaign’s core message was: “Improving accessibility in TV advertising isn’t only a societal responsibility and best practice for promoting social inclusion, but an opportunity for brands to reach millions of people”.
A campaign with numerous and wide-ranging initiatives
The #AdsForAll Campaign combined different focal points. The Clearcast team started to collect data, raise awareness, and work on specific projects to have a real social impact in advancing standards for people with disabilities.
Key initiatives included conducting research and surveys to discern attitudes and detect barriers to accessible ads and hosting the first accessible British Arrows Awards. They also introduced a new functionality to their online clearance system, The Library, requesting users to switch a toggle off if they don’t want subtitles, influencing attitudes that subtitles should be the norm.
Additionally, Clearcast concentrated on educational work too. They quickly educated themselves in order to influence conversations and content in their social platforms, meetings, and events. They also designed “Ad Accessibility Training”, which promotes subtitles, AD, and BSL, demystifies concerns, and gives practical solutions to advertising accessibility. New for 2025, this course is now CPD certified for individuals and/or companies and offered as a bespoke session.
Results that go beyond numbers
Since January 2024, Clearcast has been publishing data on the number of subtitled ads. Data corresponding to the period January-May 2024 showed that the percentage of subtitled ads remains consistent at around 20-23%, and at that moment Clearcast anticipated that there would be a rise in these figures across the following six months while momentum continued to build. Additional and more recent data is accessible here.
The #AdsForAll Campaign gave Clearcast results that go beyond numbers. They established themselves as a body capable of generating change and as a central source for accessibility insights, data, expertise, and training, positioning themselves as a reliable hub. On top of that, the campaign contributed to making Clearcast a key part of the “UK Ad Accessibility Taskforce”, comprised of varied stakeholders aiming to share knowledge, set guidance, and raise standards for accessible advertising.
