Few brands use sign language in their television advertising but Turkcell is one such. And it came about almost by accident, according to Sili Hacıhanefioğlu, consumer insight lead at Turkey's leading mobile operator.
Speaking at the MRMW Europe conference (Berlin, November 2017), she outlined an advertising research project that had been designed to assess whether viewers' attention to a TV ad was distracted by the use of a narrator signing in the corner of the screen. "Is everyone looking at the narrator and just trying to understand which sign represents which word in Turkish … with nobody watching the rest...