Wow! What a great ad! I'm assuming!

Well, the game is just done, son, and already the good people at captions.com have published a list of the companies who did - and did not - close-caption their commercials for the, uh, Super Bowl of Commercials, if you know what I mean.

I've mentioned before that the cost of CC'ing a 30-second commercial is between $200 and $400 US. So, I mean, once you've spent a quarter-million to a million bucks to make an ad, and then another gazillion to air it on the prime broadcast commercial real-estate in America, you're gonna spend a few pence to CC it for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, right?

Heh. Not so much.

Captions.com lists 17 unique brands whose Super Bowl ads were close-captioned. And 32 whose ads were not.

Queerly, there's overlap. McDonald's had one CC'd ad, and two not CC'd. Pepsi had three CC'd ads (four, if you count Pizza Hut, owned by Pepsi), and one not (four, if you count a Frito-Lay ad, a Tostitos ad and a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad - they're all owned by Pepsi.) Annheuser-Busch had two captioned and five not.

For reasons I've already talked about here, I doubt the deaf/hoh are ever going to be a really effective lobby group.

But we're here, we are aware, we are consumers, and we will vote with our dollars.

If you're wondering, here's a quick list of "the good guys" whose ads were all CC'd:

Miller Brewing Co
Ford
O2OPTIX
Bubblicious
GoDaddy.com
Visa
Quiznos Sub
Subway
Cadillac
Qwest Communications
Best Buy

ronnie