There is nothing wrong in naming another competitor based on facts: Partha Rakshit

Interview with Chairman of ASCI

In less than a week since taking over as the new chairman of Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), Partha Rakshit is already drafting guidelines for advertisements on the healthcare and education sectors. He is also working to liaison with Google and Twitter for tighter monitoring of digital ads. In his first exclusive interview, Rakshit shares with Digbijay Mishra his views on comparative advertising, the 12-minute ad cap and the need to regulate advertisments. Edited Excerpts:

What is your priority after taking over?

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, the majority of complaints processed by ASCI used to come from external sources such as complaints from the general public or intra-industry. 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. So, every week, it shortlists 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 or not. 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, ads released by the large players in the industry, like a Hindustan Unilever, P&G or Colgate. These companies sincerely believe in releasing honest and decent advertising, but often their young brand managers or creative people in their 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, for these companies, the case is more about them pushing the envelope a little too much into the violation area. Though 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. As a result, a young professional can take up this course and be certified as having thorough knowledge of the ASCI code. We are quite confident that we will succeed in this, as all the major advertisers and agencies are members of ASCI and I am sure their senior management will 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 will find scores of ads from professional education institutes, talking about 100 per cent 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 mixed results. We now plan to provide guidelines on a few such blatantly misleading communication to the media vehicles that carry the ads (the newspapers and the TV channels). We hope that they will internally sift through all such ads and refuse to release the ones that carry such misleading communication.

Why would media houses cooperate with regulating ads, their source of income?

We are hopeful that we will 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, such as the recent Colgate-Pepsodent spat? Is that unethical practice?

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

Even though it is not under your purview, but what is your reaction to the of the 12-minute-per-hour ad cap?

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

Will you have difficulties in monitoring digital ads?

The challenge is anyone can put out an ad on the digital platform. It is easier to track traditional media. We are in touch with Google, Twitter and such organisations for this. We are also studying what the self-regulating bodies in the developed countries with high internet advertising are doing in this area. We are in active touch with EASA, which is an overarching in Europe.