You’ll have seen them thousands of times without giving them much thought. They’re the lines of small text that appear at the bottom of the screen during a TV advert, saying things like “Selected stores only” or “Subject to availability”. In the industry they’re called supers, which is short for superimposed text, and you’ll also hear them called legal text, legals or simply the small print.
If your advert makes an offer or a claim that comes with conditions, there’s a good chance it will need at least one. They can look like an afterthought, but they’re governed by some surprisingly exact guidelines on size and timing, and in a 30 second advert those guidelines can shape the script and the edit more than most people expect.
What supers are for, and what they can’t do
A TV advert is short, and there’s rarely time to explain every condition out loud. Supers are there to fill in the gaps so that viewers aren’t misled. The guidance from the advertising regulator says they can be used to expand on or clarify a claim, add a qualification, clear up a minor ambiguity or state the terms and conditions that people need to know about. So if your advert says “half price sofas”, the super might explain when the offer ends or which ranges it applies to, and if you quote a monthly payment on a car, the super will carry the finance details.
The thing a super can’t do is contradict the main message. If the voiceover says “everything half price” and the small print says “selected lines only”, the text is describing a different offer from the one the viewer has just heard, and Clearcast won’t accept it. When a condition changes the meaning of the headline claim, the claim itself has to change.
In between is the kind of condition that doesn’t contradict the claim but matters a great deal to anybody thinking of acting on it. The guidance treats a condition like that as too important to leave to the small print alone. It suggests rewording the claim, saying the condition in the voiceover or putting it into the main part of the advert, and holding any super that still carries it on screen for longer than usual. As a rule of thumb, the more your advert relies on its small print, the more likely it is that the main claim needs rewording.
The rules on size and legibility
Supers have to be readable by somebody sitting on their sofa, so there are specific rules about how they appear. They’re set out in guidance from BCAP, the body that writes the TV advertising code, and Clearcast checks every advert against them.
The first of them is about size, which is given as the height of the text in television lines, the horizontal rows that make up the picture. For a high definition advert, the preferred minimum is 30 lines, or 26 lines if the text sits on a solid block of colour. The smaller size is allowed on a block because text on a plain background is easier to read than text laid over a moving picture, which is why you so often see the small print sitting on a dark strip across the bottom of the screen.
The rest of the guidance is written with that same viewer on the sofa in mind. The typeface should be plain and easy to read, with proper punctuation and enough contrast against whatever is behind it. Fancy fonts, italics and text over a busy background are all likely to be sent back. It also prefers ordinary lower case to capital letters, and two shorter lines to a single line running the full width of the screen, because both are easier to take in at a glance.
How long a super has to stay on screen
The rule that has the biggest effect on an advert is the one about time. The text has to stay up long enough to be read, and there’s a formula for it. You allow 0.2 seconds for every word, then add 2 seconds if the super is nine words or fewer, or 3 seconds if it’s ten words or more, which is there to give the viewer a moment to notice the text before they start reading. A five word super therefore needs to be on screen for 3 seconds, and a twenty word super needs 7 seconds.
What counts as a word is the part that catches people out. Numbers are counted the way you’d say them aloud, so a price or a date is usually more than one word. A web address counts as a single word, as does a familiar abbreviation such as RRP, and your company name and logo aren’t counted at all. The detail that matters most is that the count takes in all the text on screen at that moment, and not only the small print. If a large “Sale ends Sunday” graphic is up at the same time as the super, its words are added to the total, and everything has to be held for longer as a result.
What that means for the script and the edit
Do the sums on a 30 second advert and you’ll see the problem. A long super can take up a big part of the running time, and it has to sit somewhere that doesn’t fight with your logo, your offer or the subtitles. If there are several conditions, they may need to appear as separate supers at different points in the advert, each one close to the claim it belongs to. That closeness is taken seriously, and an advert for Special K was once banned because the text supporting a claim had left the screen before the voiceover made it. It’s one of the stories we’ve told in our article on banned adverts.
At the far end of the scale, a BT advert in 2016 had so many conditions attached to its offers that the small print stayed on screen for the whole of its 40 seconds. Eight viewers complained that they couldn’t read it, and the ASA decided not to uphold the complaints, because the text was taller than the guidance asked for, it was white on a plain black background and it had been held for longer than the formula required. So the guidance is the yardstick the regulator itself reaches for when somebody says they couldn’t read the text. The case also shows where a complicated offer leads, because few advertisers would choose to have small print on screen from the first second of their advert to the last.
That’s why we like to know about the terms and conditions at script stage. The simpler the offer, the shorter the super, and the cleaner the advert looks. Sometimes a small change to the wording of a claim removes the need for a super altogether, so “half price on selected sofas until Sunday” is a few more words for the voiceover, but it says what the small print would otherwise have had to.
Who decides on the wording?
We work with Clearcast to refine it, which starts when the script is submitted and they tell us which claims need qualifying. We then go back and forth with them until the wording is accurate, clear and as short as it can be. They’ll check it again on the finished advert to make sure the size and timing are right.
There’s often a pull in two directions at this point. Whoever wrote your terms and conditions would usually like as many of them on screen as possible, while the guidance says that supers should be kept to a minimum and asks Clearcast to challenge any that look too long or too complicated, without simply taking an advertiser’s word for it that every line is legally required. The way through is to ask which conditions a viewer needs in order to understand the offer. Those have to be in the advert, and the full terms can sit on your website, where there’s room for them.
For straightforward offers, that process is all you need. For more complex claims, and for regulated areas such as finance, credit, insurance or legal services, it’s well worth involving a legal or compliance professional as well, so that the wording is right for your regulator and not only for the broadcaster. If you already have a compliance team, we’ll happily work with them. Credit is the area where the small print gets longest, and we’ve gone through it separately in finance offers in TV ads.
There’s more about how clearance works in our guide to the Clearcast process, and you’ll find supers and plenty of other terms in the jargon buster. If you’ve got an offer in mind and you’re not sure what it would need, ask us.