Imagine a world where billboards didn’t mention the brand, radio ads just played a soothing tune and TV ads urgently asked you if it was time to change your supermarket,  but didn’t suggest which one to try.

Sounds ridiculous, right? But this is so often the experience of watching TV ads as a blind or partially sighted person.

Yes, there are ads which tell a beautiful, complex love story - without telling me to buy a lottery ticket. Which just asks strange rhetorical questions about food while singing I Like it Like That.

Another totally different brand uses the same song and still doesn’t tell you what the product is.

Seriously: why aren’t you telling us what you’re advertising?

There are about two million people in the UK with sight loss, and 340,000 of them are registered as blind or partially sighted.

All sorts of people with full sight are ignoring ads, skipping ads, blocking ads, tuning out - but you’re ignoring us. I would love the chance to ignore your ad!

I know the advertising industry wants to try to be inclusive, to make things accessible, to be welcoming to all. I wrote my dissertation on how blind and partially sighted people interact with brands. Hell, I've even been in an advert (it was for Burger King). So I don’t think this is on purpose.

With just one in four working age people with visual impairment actually in work, there’s a low chance that you’ll encounter a blind or partially sighted person working in advertising. But surely that’s all the more reason to find some of us and ask what we need?

The latest official development on accessible ads was a recent survey from Clearcast - though it only surveyed a mere 66 people.

Clearcast’s suggested options to improve accessibility seemed to focus on larger, more challenging, costly things like subtitles, signing, audio description.

And don’t get me wrong, I’d love those things to be standard. Perhaps AI could lend a hand here.

But while you’re working on that, there’s a very simple way to make your broadcast ads 100% more accessible. Literally: tell us the brand; tell us the product.

All the work that has gone into the ad; the casting, the scripts, handling the client from hell… And if you don’t mention the product, that’s 2 million people instantly cut out of your customer base.