Measuring up
13 September 2007
Superimposed text that appears along the bottom of TV screens during an ad can be an irritation to advertisers because it rarely forms a part of the main message they want to convey to the audience. And it can irritate those watching because it can detract from the interesting bits of the commercial. But it can clarify a claim in an ad by explaining important qualifications and it might be required for legal or regulatory reasons.
And, because the supers are important, advertisers and broadcasters need to ensure that on-screen text is big enough for audiences to be able to read it: if it is too small, the consumer protection objective is defeated.
Size matters
To help advertisers and broadcasters comply with the TV Advertising Standards Code, which states that text in TV ads must be legible, BCAP’s Guidance Note on On-Screen Text and Subtitling in Television Advertisements specifies the minimum permissible height for any text appearing on screen. Text should be no smaller than 16 TV lines for ads made in widescreen format and 14 TV lines for ads made in 4:3 format. But those minimum heights apply only to ads made in SDTV (standard definition television).
The CAP Code, however, does not refer to specific minimum text heights for non-broadcast advertisements; instead, the Help Note on Claims That Require Qualification states that footnotes should be visible to a normally-sighted person reading the marketing communication once from a reasonable distance and at a reasonable speed.
New technology
As HDTV (high definition television) technology becomes more popular, more ads are likely to be recorded and broadcast in that new format. And that means BCAP’s Guidance Note needs to take account of the new technology to ensure that no matter whether audiences own SDTV sets or HDTV sets, and no matter the format in which ads are recorded and broadcast, on-screen text is big enough to be legible.
The need to amend the Guidance Note has arisen because the lines on an HDTV set are smaller than the lines on an SDTV set. More lines are packed into an HDTV screen so it can show clearer, sharper images: SDTV screens are made up of 576 visible lines whereas HDTV screens are often made up of 720 or 1080 visible lines. Because they are smaller on an HDTV screen, the individual lines take up a smaller proportion of the total screen area; so the Guidance Note has been updated to ensure that on-screen text occupies a similar proportion of viewers’ TV screens, be they SDTV or HDTV ones.
To complicate things different types of HDTV sets have different numbers of lines, unlike SDTV sets. The updated Guidance addresses that by stating that on-screen text shown in an HDTV ad should usually be 30 lines high when scaled to 1080-line HDTV format. That way, regardless of the type of TV you are watching – HDTV or SDTV – on-screen text should measure up.
Read the BCAP Guidance Note on On-Screen Text and Subtitling in Television Advertisements, including the updated section on minimum on-screen text height requirements.