Canadians are being given a five-minute glimpse into the everyday life of a blind person in a new TV and online initiative for Accessible Media Inc. (AMI), a national media organization that makes both TV shows and printed materials accessible to the visually impaired.
Developed by TBWA\Toronto, the short film Jeff’s Day depicts a typical day for Toronto resident Jeff Berwick, who has been blind since the age of 13. Berwick was selected from about a dozen potential candidates.
Peter Burke, vice-president of marketing and communications for AMI in Toronto, said the campaign is intended to both raise consumer awareness of the need for media accessibility, and enable AMI to establish a relationship with the community it serves in order to learn more about their programming preferences.
“We live in a media-saturated world right now, and most people take for granted that everyone has the same access,” said Burke. “The campaign is really to seed the thought that that’s not the case.”
Directed by American documentary filmmaker David Grabias, the five-minute YouTube video (30, 45 and 60-second versions will air on U.S. ad avails and female-focused specialty channels) shows Berwick making his way to and from work, using what he describes as “sound shadows” to help him navigate. For instance, the electrical hum of a box on his street enables him to determine how close he is to his home.
The spot concludes with Berwick talking about how watching TV offers his family the chance to unwind after a long day and how AMI’s described video service enables him to enjoy the experience. “Having the described video is amazing; it’s like a whole new world,” says Berwick in a voiceover. “I don’t have to wait, then, for someone to tell me why people laughed three seconds ago. I can be with the program, and it’s much more inclusive at that point.”
“We wanted to make sure we were creating empathy and understanding and not pity,” said Burke of the initiative. “The idea came back that said ‘Let’s look at this from a first-person standpoint and in a documentary style,’ which is frankly a little scary because you don’t tend to create marketing campaigns completely unscripted. We believed that the honesty was what would best convey the message.”
This is the first consumer marketing outreach for AMI, which expanded its mandate from print about two years ago and changed its name from the National Broadcast Reading Service.
“It’s hard to tell people how important it is to have accessible media for the blind, so we thought that we needed to share what the sighted world is like for someone who can’t see,” said Allen Oke, writer/creative director at TBWA/Toronto. “We simply sat down and said ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a great person, put a camera on him, and have him take us through a single day.”
Accessible Media’s YouTube page also features a series of one-minute videos extracted from the main video, but it is the full-length version that has resonated most with viewers, attracting more than 19,000 views since being posted a week ago.
“We were under the impression that there’s a threshold to holding someone’s interest [online], so we came up with the one-minute versions to direct people to the documentary,” said Mark Mason, TBWA art director/creative director. “But what has happened is that people are being drawn straightaway to the documentary and are willing to watch six minutes worth of really good story.”
“It’s proven to us that when you have really compelling content you can break the rules and hold the attention of the audience longer than [marketing experts] say, which is one minute,” added Oke.
TBWA is also working on what Oke described as a “very ambitious” project involving universities and tech companies including Google that will demonstrate how accessibility can also be transferred to the web.
“AMI’s mandate is that they’ve got television shows that are described and print where, but the next frontier is, of course, online. That’s what we’re aiming to achieve down the road – a game-changing play in the web space,” said Oke.
“A lot of people are using the web for watching television; YouTube is a source of content for people – but it’s not particularly accessible to people who can’t see,” said Burke. “What we’re hoping to do is much like we made television accessible through described video and print accessible by creating an audio version, we want to work towards making video content on the web equally accessible.”
