Strategy
Part of Designing video advertising with a checklist built around the audience job
3 video advertising checks before signing off
Three video advertising checks to run before sign-off: the claim, the captions, and the placement, each with the evidence a reviewer needs to see.
What to take away
- Three checks decide sign-offthe claim, the captions, and the placement. Everything else is paperwork around them.
- Each check closes on a named artifact, not a memory of a meeting.
- Captions fail on timing, speaker labels and prices far more often than on missing words.
- A placement is not approved until the destination and the outcome event fire from that placement.
- Reopen all three after a new cut, a translation, or a new platform.
A sign-off meeting is a bad place to discover that nobody checked the price in the voiceover. The three checks below are the ones that stop a release. Run them in order, because the claim decides what the captions must say and both decide where the video can run.
Check one: the claim
Write down every claim the video makes, spoken or on screen, and the evidence behind it. Prices, comparisons, health or performance statements, and "free" all count. Competition Bureau guidance on advertising claims is the place to start in Canada, and the FTC's truth-in-advertising materials cover the United States. Neither is a substitute for counsel.
Claim check before sign-off
- List every spoken and on-screen claim
- Substantiate prices, comparisons, health claims
- Confirm 'free' offers meet rules
- Set an expiry date per claim
- Cut or shorten if unproven for flight
Give each claim an expiry date. A price that was accurate at the shoot is a false claim six weeks later when the spot is still running. If the claim cannot be substantiated for the whole flight, cut it or shorten the flight.
Check two: the captions
W3C's guide to making audio and video media accessible covers planning, captions, transcripts and players. It is guidance, not a legal opinion, and it does not know your jurisdiction.
Watch for the failures that survive automated captioning:
- Speaker changes with no label
- Technical terms and brand names spelled phonetically
- Prices and phone numbers rendered wrong
- Meaningful sounds, like an alarm or a door, left out
- Captions that sit under the controls on a phone
The FCC consumer guide on captioning Internet video programming explains which US television programming carries captioning duties when shown online. Its scope is narrow and the document is dated. Check whether it applies to your content and distribution before you rely on it.
Check three: the placement
A placement is the publisher, app, seller, device and context where the ad runs. Approve it only after you have seen the ad there.
For each placement, confirm the destination URL resolves and the outcome event fires. Then check the exclusions: sensitive categories, children's content, and any brand-safety list your team maintains. The display advertising checklist covers the same ground for banner and native inventory, and the placement questions carry over to video.
If the buy runs through a supply-chain partner, ask what the software acquisition guidance calls supply-chain exposure: who else touches the tag, the creative and the data. The W3C privacy principles make the same point about privacy work, which should not be pushed onto the viewer to manage.
Worked example: a thirty-second spot that failed all three
A retailer shot a thirty-second spot in March with a sale price of $49.99. It ran through June.
The claim check would have caught the price. The caption check would have caught the captions reading "forty-nine ninety-nine" over a screen showing $59.99. The placement check would have caught the ad running inside a children's game app, which was on the brand's exclusion list.
None of the three failures was subtle. All three were found after spend, by a customer complaint.
Recording the result
For each of the three checks, record one of four outcomes. The outcomes are pass, fail, not applicable, or accepted exception. Also record the evidence location, the reviewer and the date. A checked box with no artifact behind it protects nobody.
Stop the release when a claim, a caption or a placement fails. A high score on the other two does not offset it.
Reopen all three after a new cut, a translation, a new platform, or a new audience. Reopen all three after a changed claim or an expired rights term. Set the next review date and name the change that would pull it forward.
Common questions
Can automated captions pass the check?
Only after a person has watched the delivered file and confirmed accuracy, timing, speaker labels and the handling of prices. Upload validation is not a caption review.
What actually blocks a launch?
An unsubstantiated claim, a caption error on a price or a safety statement, or a placement on an excluded property. Each is a stop, not a note.
Does every variant need a fresh review?
Review what changed: the claim, the captions, the format, the placement and the destination. Keep versions labelled so a reviewer can tell which cut was approved. When the next cut goes into production, designing video advertising with a checklist built around the audience job keeps the same three checks attached to the work rather than to the meeting.
