Breaking the Sound Barrier: How Silence Sold a Show

When you're responsible for reaching 45 million viewers a month, unconventional choices can feel like a big risk.

British crime drama Code of Silence, which premiered on ITVX in 2025, was anything but safe: a deaf lead, an intricate premise built around lip-reading and covert policing, and a subject – the daily experience of deafness in Britain – that could easily read as worthy rather than gripping. Rose Ayling-Ellis, the lead, was famous for winning Strictly Come Dancing, not anchoring prime-time drama. On every conventional measure, this was a show that asked a lot of a mainstream audience.

ITV Creative's task was to deliver a blockbuster mainstream campaign that embraced the deaf experience.

And the campaign was bold - it launched with soundless social content featuring the show's star, Rose Ayling-Ellis, where she invites the viewer to lip-read, really drawing them into the content and piquing their interest in the show. Immersive Spotify ads deliberately muffled key audio, placing listeners inside the show’s perspective before they’d watched a frame. For the first time, a broadcaster had demonstrated to the nation what deaf accessibility in advertising can look like.

Code of Silence became the most-searched new British drama of 2025.