Nothing wrong in naming competitor in ad if facts correct: Partha Rakshit

Q&A with chairman of ASCI

Less than a week as the new chairman of ASCI (Advertising Standards Council of India), Partha Rakshit is already a busy man with draft guidelines ready for healthcare and education sector advertisements and ASCI is already in touch with Google, Twitter for tighter monitoring of digital ads.

In his first exclusive interview, Rakshit tells Digbijay Mishra that there is nothing wrong in naming one’s competitor directly in an ad as long as the facts being claimed are correct. The 12 minute ad cap per hour by TRAI is just a creative issue, he claims. Edited Excerpts:

What are your plans about taking ASCI and its mission forward?

Over the last couple of years, there has been a sea change in the way ASCI works, primarily driven by more pro-active self regulation. Earlier, what used to happen is that the majority of complaints processed by ASCI used to come from external sources such as the lay public or intra industry complaints.

Since 2012, we have tied up with TAM, the TV rating organisation, and they have a system whereby they can monitor all new ads that are released in the TV and print media. We have given them our ASCI guidelines on what contravenes the ASCI code of truthful and decent advertising, and so every week, they shortlist for us, the ads which could be violating the ASCI code.

These ads are then placed before our Consumer Complaints Council which meets every week to adjudicate whether any of them indeed violates our code. This has led to almost a 10-fold increase in the ads we adjudicate on.
Going forward, we are looking at two new steps this year. If I were to segment the types of ads violating the ASCI code, I would put them into two buckets.

What would be those two buckets?

First are ads released by the large players in the industry, like a Unilever or P&G or Colgate. These companies sincerely believe in releasing honest and decent advertising, but often their young brand managers or the young creative people in the ad agency do not know enough of the ASCI code, which by the way, has been excellently drafted to ensure truthful and decent advertising.

So in most cases for these companies, the violation is more of them pushing the envelope a little too much into the violation area. Whereas we have been going every year and making presentations on the ASCI code to these companies and their agencies, we plan a much bigger mode of dissemination of our code this year through on-line certification where a young professional could take up this course on-line and be certified as having thorough knowledge of the ASCI code.

We are quite confident that we would succeed in this, as all the major advertisers and agencies are members of ASCI and I am sure their senior management would actively encourage their associates to go through this course.

The second segment of violators of the ASCI code are smaller players in the health and education sectors .These sectors actually contribute to the bulk of the violations.They are not ASCI members, nor are they overly concerned about honest or decent advertising.

To give you an example of dishonest advertising in the education sector, you would find scores of ads from professional education institutes, talking about 100% placement. In almost all cases, this is not true. So far, we have been writing to these advertisers to withdraw the offending ads, but we have had mixed results.

We now plan to provide guidelines on a few such blatantly misleading communication areas to the media houses that carry the ads (the newspapers and the TV channels) and we hope that they would internally sift through all such ads and refuse to release the ones that carry such misleading communication.

Why would media companies listen to this and regulate ads?

We are hopeful that we would succeed, because all the TV channels and publishers that matter are ASCI members. We won’t be asking them to look at the entire ASCI code but just a couple of areas of blatant miscommunication which constitute a large proportion of the complaints that we receive.

What about competitive advertising? We have seen recent cases like the Colgate-Pepsodent saga.

We find nothing wrong in competitive advertising. There is nothing wrong in naming another competitor as long as what has been claimed in the ads is factual and can be substantiated.

What do you think would be the impact of 12 minutes an hour ad cap regulation?

This is not really in the domain of ASCI. It is a creative issue in the sense that the advertiser would have to communicate within a more smaller frame of time. It is harder to get the message across when time is less. We would probably see more 10 second ads than before.

What do yo have to say about digital advertising and its future in India?

Digital advertising has a bright future for sure. But the challenge, as far as ASCI is concerned, is to monitor digital ads as anyone could put out an ad on the digital platform. It is easier to track traditional media like TV and print.

We are in touch with Google, Twitter and such organisations with regard to this. We are also studying what self-regulating bodies in developed countries with high internet advertising are doing in this area. We are in active touch with EASA, which is an overarching self-regulating body for advertising in Europe.

Indians still think digital should be free. Do you see a change in mentality any time soon?

Of course, with time, advertisers would see the value of the digital platform and they would pay for it just as they do in Europe and in the US. In both these places, more than 25% of paid-for advertising is via the internet.