Companies Boost Number of Deaf Actors Appearing in Commercials
A deaf mother shares a cookie with her hearing-impaired son in a commercial for Oreos. In a spot for Johnsonville Sausage, a deaf boy uses sign language to explain how the smell of breakfast awakens him. A boy learns sign language to befriend a deaf classmate in a Snap.com ad.
More and more commercials are using deaf actors. Advertisers say sign language is a powerful attention-getter. And using deaf actors is smart business since people with hearing loss account for 51% of the nation’s 54 million disabled.
“This might have been the year of signing,” said Easter Seals spokeswoman Sara Brewster, whose organization recognizes firms with ads featuring disabled people.
Advertisers do use actors with other disabilities. Blind people appear in recent ads for discount broker Charles Schwab Corp. and McDonald’s Corp. And the first TV commercial with a disabled person--a 1984 Levi Strauss & Co. spot--showed a man in a wheelchair popping a wheelie.
But deaf actors snag the most leads in commercials, said Gail Williamson, who helps link casting directors with disabled actors. That’s because deaf people do not look disabled, she said.
“It’s still a culture of beautiful people,” said Williamson, an official with the state-run Media Access office in Los Angeles.
There are no comprehensive figures on disabled people in ads, Williamson said. But since the 1990 passage of federal legislation defining the rights of the disabled, deafness has risen on advertisers’ radar screens, people in the industry agree.
Between 1991 and 1998, Dr. Scholl used a deaf actress to pitch its wart remover. And Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Publix Super Markets Inc. recently have portrayed deaf people in ads.
“Deafness is the hot area in disability imagery,” said Jennifer Kaplan, a spokeswoman for the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities.
In a business based on appearance, deafness is viewed as a safe option. Casting director Sheila Manning said that for companies that want to include disabled people in ads, “the easiest way to go is with the deaf because they are not unpleasant to look at.”
People with other disabilities feel left out.
Compared with the deaf, blind people have been less visible in TV advertising, observers say. Research shows that next to AIDS, people fear blindness most, said Gil Johnson, West Coast director for the American Foundation for the Blind.
“People who are amputees are looked upon as more grotesque,” said R. David Smith, a disabled San Diego stuntman for film and TV. Smith, who is missing his lower left arm, said he’s been offered only one role in a commercial--in a spot for United Way.
A telling exception: a recent Fox Sports.com spot in which a man uses his feet to diaper a baby. The spot uses the stunt toes of Mark Goffeney, a San Diego musician born without arms. Another actor is used for the full-body shot.
For their part, deaf people don’t mind standing in for disabled consumers.
“I’d say, go for it!” DeafNation newspaper editor Marvin Miller wrote in an e-mail. “Use us as a poster child for disability. . . . We’re thrilled every time we see deaf people in ads.”
Deaf actress Terrylene Sacchetti landed the role as mother in the Oreo commercial, beating out a hearing actress who also auditioned opposite Sacchetti’s son, Gianni Manganelli, 8, who is also deaf.
“When we saw his mom and him, there was no [other] way we could capture . . . the unspoken things between two people that share that kind of silence,” said director Rob Lieberman.
In the spot, Sacchetti teaches her son to twist, lick and dunk an Oreo cookie as they picnic at a park, the sounds of a nearby playground unheard to them. Sacchetti signs--”What do you mean you want to eat it like Daddy?”--before Gianni stuffs a cookie in his mouth. The spot is subtitled.
The absence of spoken dialogue heightens the drama of the spots, people involved in commercial production say.
“It’s like watching a silent movie,” said David Landau, producer of the Snap.com spot. “You cry when Charlie Chaplin gives the girl a rose.”
Gianni also appears in the Emmy-winning Snap.com spot. In it, an actress playing his mother uses sign language, apparently to comfort him, though the scene is not subtitled.
“If you knew what she was saying, it would be less powerful,” said the ad’s writer, Mark Bennett. “You’re filling in the blanks.”
Bennett said a 1998 Johnsonville Breakfast Sausage ad inspired him to write the Snap.com spot. The sausage ad features two real-life brothers, Ashten, who is deaf, and Demetrius Johnson of Riverside. Ashten, then 10, describes in animated sign language how he sleeps through his mom’s noisy cooking but the smell of sausage rouses him. Demetrius, then 9, grabs his brother in a hug, and they collapse onto the bed.
“Our charge was to show that Johnsonville Sausage has this great aroma,” said Kelly Trewartha, associate creative director and copywriter for Clarity Coverdale Fury, of Minneapolis.
The character’s deafness was “integral to the spot,” Trewartha said. “We couldn’t have used a hearing person to do that.” The company attributed a “substantial sales increase” to the ad, said product manager Mary Mattner. The ad continues to air.
Real life sometimes inspires advertisers to feature deaf actors or actual employees. Lakeland, Fla.-based Publix Super Markets learned of a deaf cake decorator in one of its bakeries and produced a spot using an actress in the role. And Wal-Mart features a hard-of-hearing employee who speaks about helping a deaf customer.
But sometimes efforts to use the deaf backfire. In 1997, General Motors Corp.’s Saturn had an ad in which a customer invented a hand sign to depict the car. It yanked it in embarrassment when it later learned the woman wasn’t deaf.
