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IN TOUCH – TV Advertising; Commercial Usage of Artificial Intelligence

TX:Ìý 18.04.2023Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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White

Good evening.Ìý One of the main aims of In Touch has always been to investigate the things you ask us to look into.Ìý So, I was delighted when we got an email from listener, Nathan Tree, asking us about something which has been bugging me for years because it seems to be on the increase.Ìý Just before we introduce Nathan, to get this off his chest, let me play something to you that should illustrate what he’s going to be talking about, except that, in a way, that’s exactly what it doesn’t do.Ìý You may see what I mean.

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Clips – Commercials

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Well, listening to that is Nathan Tree.Ìý Nathan, lots of enthusiasm there, what’s missing?

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Tree

The brand names and the products, I had no idea what any of those adverts were for.

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White

Is that something you feel you’ve noticed more of?

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Tree

Increasingly, yes.Ìý Generally, when I watch a television show, it might be one or two adverts per programme that I’m not sure what they’re advertising to me because I can’t see the screen.Ìý There’s so many things now that audio description and they’re very well done and then you find the adverts in between don’t show what’s being advertised to you, so it’s almost like you’re being excluded from the market.Ìý For me it’s a question of choice, whether I want to buy a product or use a service and it almost feels like they’ve decided that me, as a visually impaired person, doesn’t need to know about that product or service and I want to have that choice, that autonomy really.

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White

Have you complained about this directly to companies who do it?

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Tree

I have started to, I’ve started tweeting at them, I’ve written to a couple.Ìý They don’t often respond to be honest.Ìý The party line kind of is – we have other ways of advertising to people with visual impairment.Ìý But from my own work and my own research, I know that not everyone is using all those different avenues, some people only get their window to the outside world from watching television when it comes to advertising.Ìý This is the only way they interact with that brand and it’s not good enough.

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White

I mean we’ll go into this a bit more with our other two contributors but the point is, television is a visual medium, I mean, in a way, it’s not surprising that the main concentration is on a visual message, is it?

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Tree

Not necessarily.Ìý I think it’s not just for blind and visually impaired people, a lot of people are watching television whilst doing other things and they’re being missed as part of the market as well.Ìý But also, we watch television in groups, in families and things like that, so just because we can’t see the screen, doesn’t mean we’re not interacting with that content.

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White

Nathan, thanks for the moment, do stay with us.

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Also listening to that is Zoë Waller, who’s an executive producer of Studio Yes, now they’re an award-winning video production company, whose job is to deliver the messages their clients want delivered.Ìý Zoë, thanks for coming on.Ìý Why would you want to deliver a message that didn’t mention the brand you were advertising?

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Waller

It’s an interesting question I’ve been pondering since I was posed it last week.Ìý Partially, I’m sitting in the experience of having listened to the adverts, played audibly rather than visually and I really kind of got the sense of the experience that somebody who is blind or partially sighted would have, so that was interesting.

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White

And can you see how deeply infuriating that might be?

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Waller

I mean it would grind my gears totally.Ìý I’m not laughing because it’s funny, I’m laughing because I would find that a bit infuriating and then, after a while, I can see how that would build up.Ìý So, I appreciate that as an experience that I’ve just had.

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What I would say is, as a personal context, being in my part of the advertising industry, so as a production company we would get an idea and a budget through from an advertising agency and we’d take a look at that and one of those inclusions would be whether or not there’s a creative reason to have the voiceover artist announce the brand at end or if there’s a creative reason to have, what you would call, an end card and a title card and just copy at the end and the copy is just written text of what the brand is and kind of a call to action, as it were.Ìý Some of the brands may not have enough finance to pay the usage of a voiceover artist to announce or have a voiceover artist in the whole of the advert.

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White

Is that because voiceover artists charge a lot for their services?

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Waller

Yeah, I mean, for a TV advert, yes they do.Ìý If it’s a big brand then a voiceover artist could charge a premium for what that usage was.Ìý The usage is what they get for being the voice of that brand for a particular time.Ìý That time could be one month, two months, six months.Ìý

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White

And every time it goes out, they add a nought.

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Waller

Well, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t but what you have to understand is that voiceover artists, if they’re working for a well-known brand, it means that they can’t actually work for other brands that may be in conflict of that brand or have a clash with that brand, so they need to get paid well for what that time and usage is.Ìý And sometimes a brand just doesn’t have the finance to do that.Ìý Then there might be a creative reason, which is why you don’t have one.Ìý Sometimes brands can feel like the ad is more impactful without announcing it.Ìý And I would assert or assume that inclusion of those who are blind or partially sighted isn’t something that they would be thinking of when they’re making their creative because I would assume or assert that the people that are writing the advert are doing it from a, I would suppose, kind of an ableist kind of way.

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White

Okay, so those are some of the commercial reasons, some of the reasons about usage.Ìý What about the actual rules?Ìý Also with us is Malcolm Phillips, from the body which does regulate advertising, the Advertising Standards Authority and Malcolm’s its Regulatory Policy Manager.

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Let’s cut to the chase, Malcolm, aren’t companies who do this breaking any kind of rules, after all they’re making their adverts effectively inaccessible to a whole section of the community?

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Phillips

They’re not breaking rules currently by doing that.Ìý The ASA system is there to ensure that advertising doesn’t mislead people or harm them or offend them but we don’t impose the kinds of quota on audio-described content, for example, that Nathan was talking about earlier, when he was talking about programming itself.Ìý And the reason for that is that programming has always been understood as a public good, no one has ever conceived of advertising in quite that way, although I take Nathan’s point about it being the main point of information for some people, so commercial products, but fundamentally people go there for the programming and advertisers buy opportunities to talk to them in between the programming.Ìý And what they’re always doing in that sense is making exclusions because they want to target particular audiences.Ìý If they want to advertise premium goods then they’re not going to be targeting kids’ programming.Ìý So, they’re always making exclusions, sometimes consciously and sometimes, as in this case I think, unconsciously.

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White

Yeah, because one of the things that they’re supposed not to do or do things which, you know, are to the detriment of people who are seeing the adverts, surely if you can’t see them and you’re being excluded, that’s to your detriment, isn’t it?

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Phillips

I mean, fundamentally…

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White

As a lawyer I could argue that, I think.

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Phillips

I mean certainly it seems to me very clear, from what Nathan has said and from what we heard when we spoke to the RNIB about this some years ago, that it is to the detriment of blind and partially sighted members of the audience who feel excluded and I don’t mean to dismiss that for one second.Ìý But you have to understand that, as I say, we are there to prevent people from being influenced by advertising in a way that’s ultimately to their detriment and so that’s the fundamental way that we think about detriment.Ìý But arguably, when you have a brand that isn’t saying who it is, they’re also experiencing detriment at that point, right?Ìý I mean the advertiser that you played, who said, it’s time to change your supermarket, well if you don’t know which supermarket it is, potentially, they’re asking their own customers to change, right, which isn’t very good or might not be seen as very effective advertising.

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White

Have you heard many cases based on complaints about non-verbal adverts or the non-mentioning of the brand being advertised?

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Phillips

It’s something that we looked into when we did some work on what the consequences might be if people start to do more audio description.Ìý There’s a reason why advertisers use the full range of means at their disposal to impart information in a television ad, it’s because quite often they’ve got quite a lot of information to impart and they’re doing it in a 15 or 30 second space.Ìý So, you’re going to want to spend time talking to the audience about the brand and you might put some stuff on screen, while you’re talking, that they can check out if they’re interested in the offer.Ìý But if you do an audio-described ad, you’re faced with the challenge of trying to cram all of that information into a much shorter space.

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White

Let me bring Nathan back because that’s interesting – we’re moving on to the kind of things that might be able to solve some of these problems.Ìý I imagine your heart isn’t bleeding for the advertisers but nonetheless some interesting points have been made.

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Tree

Commercially, yeah, I understand where you’re coming from with all this but I’m very much aware of a specific advert of a Lloyds Bank advert where you’ve just got a horse running across the screen and no voiceover whatsoever.

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Clip – Lloyds Bank commercial

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So, there is a possibility to put things into those kinds of more artistic adverts.Ìý I’ve worked with advertisers before and they take their job as an art, it’s making something really beautiful, almost like a film in so many ways and I think that some of those ones surely the voiceover would make that better for people to be able to engage with it as well.

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White

Perhaps it’s better to go back to Zoë than Malcolm on that.Ìý Do you see the point that Nathan’s making there?

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Waller

Very recently I had something sent to me with an audio-described animatic, which for me was great because it meant that I didn’t have to necessarily read something.Ìý However, it did make a 30 second animatic over two minutes long.Ìý So, I wonder how this could work but not elongate a 30 second advert.Ìý That’s a quandary I’m in, so I can’t answer directly your question yet but I think that it poses a useful question to ask industry-wide, is there something we can do because there probably is.

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White

Well, we’ve raised some really interesting issues, we could probably raise a lot more but we’re going to have to leave it at that point, for the moment.Ìý Malcolm Phillips, Zoë Waller, thank you very much for coming on and discussing this and Nathan Tree, thank you very much for raising this.

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Now if you were listening last week, you’ll know that AI – artificial intelligence – could be playing an increasingly important role in the lives of visually impaired people.Ìý And commercial companies seem already to be cottoning on to the opportunities.Ìý For example, in offering help in how to get the best out of your makeup.Ìý Well, I must say, I don’t use a great deal of makeup these days, so I thought I’d better hand over to our reporter, Fern Lulham, to explain what’s going on.

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Lulham

Makeup and sight loss, a potentially dangerous duo is you don’t know what you’re doing.Ìý So, I decided to put Estee Lauder’s new app, the voice-enabled makeup assistant, to the test with two budding experimenters.Ìý The first, seasoned pro fashion and makeup blogger Emily Davison.

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Davison

I’ve always been exposed to makeup; I’ve always enjoyed makeup.Ìý I wear it every day and it’s something that I am very kind of involved with.

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Lulham

And at the other end of the scale, with all the artistic licence of a bull in a China shop, yours truly.

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Voice-enabled makeup assistant

For best results maintain a neutral expression and, if possible, keep both eyes open.Ìý To begin checking your makeup say start.

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Lulham

Start.

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Voice-enabled makeup assistant

Great, then let’s get started.

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Lulham

But before we reveal our findings, I chatted to an executive director at Estee Lauder, Monica Rastogi about what makes this app special.

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Rastogi

There is nothing on the market currently that is able to do what this app is able to do.Ìý Using artificial intelligence, it is able to assess how the makeup is being applied on your face.Ìý So, if you’re applying lipstick, if it’s off to one side, if it’s not perfectly even and then able to speak to you to help you individually, on your own, be able to correct that.

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Voice-enabled makeup assistant

I detected one area for you to review.Ìý On your lower lip there’s extra coverage beyond the right section, consider wiping off the extra lipstick around the outline of your lips.Ìý Would you like to touch it up now?

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Lulham

Yes.

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Davison

It’s very simplistic, it kind of goes through the fundamentals.Ìý It gives you a basic step-by-step guide on how to do makeup, if you’ve done something wrong.Ìý Anyone looking for something a bit more advanced, like how to do a cut crease or something like that, maybe not as kind of useful in terms of that.Ìý But I think if you’re just trying to start with makeup and you haven’t got someone sighted who can help you, I can see this app being very useful for them, I think it’s definitely got merit.

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Rastogi

This app is one step in our journey to making beauty more accessible.Ìý We have to think about it holistically, you know, everything from education to employee recruitment, to what do our stores look like, really how do we embed it across the business.Ìý It must sit outside of just a jar or just tech or just I&D, so that we can drive it together and really make progress.

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Davison

We are moving towards what I would hope to be a more inclusive society for consumers and consumerism and I think there’s a lot of emphasis on working with diverse people and I think this is just one facet of this.Ìý It’s one area that I still see lacking so much, that people can’t actually walk into a shop and know what they’re buying or be able to use something independently without aid.Ìý That definitely needs to change.

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Voice-enabled makeup assistant

Okay.Ìý I’m checking it now.Ìý Let me share the instructions again…

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Lulham

Oh, I’ve got to listen to all the information again.

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Rastogi

One of the things that we learned, as people were using, is a skip button, to help people speed through the conversation flow as they’re doing their makeup application.Ìý As with any app, we’re constantly making iterations and improvements and ensuring that it’s able to meet the needs of the consumer who’s using it.

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Davison

One thing that I would really like the app to incorporate is more options for shade matching and shade picking because the biggest issue I have is colour matching, shade matching, finding shades that look good at me and that’s one of the things I still struggle with.

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Voice-enabled makeup assistant

Your lipstick looks fabulous.

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Lulham

Ah, finally, somebody who appreciates me.

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Rastogi

The app is something that you can download from the app store and we are targeted to launch on the Google Play Store within the next year.Ìý While the technology is Estee Lauder’s company’s it can be used with whatever’s in your makeup bag today.

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Davison

Have fun with it because I think sometimes when I was younger and I was trying to do makeup, it was really hard because I just felt like I was just constantly noticing my shortfalls and where I was failing.Ìý But makeup’s fun, makeup’s supposed to be about enjoying yourself, it’s supposed to be about new fun products that make you feel nice and that’s all it should ever be, it should never be anything but that.

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Fulham

It certainly feels like the beauty industry is starting to do more than just pay lip service to accessibility and while the app continues to develop, I think it’s building on a promising foundation with immaculate coverage, of course.

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Voice-enabled makeup assistant

Your foundation looks great.Ìý Would you like me to check anything else?

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Fulham

Nope, that’s enough, thank you.

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White

Fern Lulham, thank you.

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Well, finally, an important piece of news which will require some swift action if you want to vote in the upcoming English local elections on Thursday week.Ìý For the first time, you’ll require photographic ID before you can cast your vote.Ìý In Scotland and Wales this requirement will apply in future circumstances.Ìý Northern Ireland already has had this photographic requirement since 2003.Ìý Among the documents accepted as a proof of your ID are a driving licence – not too many of us have one of those – a passport and, more relevantly, perhaps, a blue badge or a disabled person’s bus pass.Ìý There is actually a long list of valid forms of ID on the Electoral Commission’s website but if you don’t have any of them you can apply for something called a Voter Authority Certificate.Ìý And you can apply for this online or via a form that you can get from and post back to your local authority.Ìý And if you need help with this, you can call the Electoral Commission’s helpline on 0800 328 0280.Ìý The deadline to apply for a Voter Authority Certificate to vote in the English local elections is next Tuesday, that’s 25th April.

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And that’s it for today.Ìý You can add your comments about what you’ve heard by emailing intouch@bbc.co.uk, you can leave a voice message on 0161 8361338 or go to our website for more information on bbc.co.uk/intouch.

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From me, Peter White, producer Beth Hemmings and studio managers Colin Sutton and Simon Highfield, goodbye.

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