Has the illustrious world of captioning slipped through the cracks? Aussie agency The Foundry wants to make sure that it hasn’t, with a campaign for captioning service provider Red Bee. 

 Appearing in a range of ad industry publications, the campaign has the tagline, ‘Without captions, you’re just not getting the full story.’

Four ads show imagery that, on the surface, portrays an obvious story, but the accompanying caption reveals that you shouldn’t be too presumptuous about the meaning.

 Red Bee creates live and pre-recorded closed captions subtitles for major Australian broadcast networks such as SBS, Nine Network, Seven Network and Network Ten. The company also supplies captioning for major advertisers and their agencies.

“It probably seems like an easy process, getting advertisers to caption their television commercials, but the reality is there are still many who do not,” says Red Bees principal Michael Gold.

The Foundry’s first task for Red Bee was to produce an ad to appear in the MADC Awards Annual. Associate creative director, Annie Price developed the campaign from one initial creative to a series of four.  

“The advertising industry can be the toughest audience, so it was vital that the campaign was cheeky, a little dark and to have an impact,” explains Price.

The Foundry has an award up its sleeve (the Advertising Captioning Award from the 2008 Captioning Awards) and some interesting ideas – and Newspup is a huge fan of captioned kung fu films on SBS!