TV ads are part of our everyday life. We are used to seeing them while we watch TV or before online video content.

We often find adverts that are not made in our own country and so are dubbed to be transmitted and understood in the destination country.

There are, however, a variety of ways to do this: dubbing, voice-over and subtitles.

Regarding this issue, the research institute CSA Research is examining the use of videos by companies worldwide.
In particular, it focuses on different TV ads and online videos by energy suppliers, including EDF and E.ON. These companies bring electricity and gas to the homes of the United Kingdom but they are both located abroad, in France and Germany respectively.

Let’s take as an example the video of the latest ad campaign by E.ON, created for the English and Swedish markets. Both versions star the famous mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, who speaks exclusively in English in the ads. The CSA Research team, however, compared these videos with some extracts from previous interviews, noting that the mountaineer’s accent results as different, arriving at the conclusion that Messner has been dubbed on this occasion.

E.ON, however, appear to have opted for a different solution in the case of the video destined to Germany: here Messner speaks German and only uses English in the final part, revealing his real accent.

Similarly, EDF does not have one single approach to localisation in its videos: in one case, the company clearly sets out to address the English market, leaving the video only in English without adding any subtitles; in another case, it decides to make a video with voice-over in French and subtitles (again in French).

The conclusion that the CSA Research team reached is that both E.ON and EDF, despite being established companies, still need to develop an informed approach to localisation and (even more importantly) reveal that they have not taken into consideration people with hearing problems, particularly in the absence of subtitles.

Producers of multimedia content do not always consider this minority group and this can be a defect in the localisation process.

When promoting a TV ad in other countries, it’s not enough to check that the sound is good; subtitles are also necessary for the videos, in order not to exclude those viewers that cannot hear. 

Let’s see how we can help in the localisaion of your videos, including every type of viewer.