ASCI announces Narendra Ambwani as the new Chairman

At the Board Meeting of The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), Narendra Ambwani, Director, Agro Tech Foods Ltd., was unanimously elected Chairman of the Board of ASCI. As a member of the Board of Governors for seven years, he has provided active support to Self-Regulation in the Advertising movement.

Benoy Roy Chawdhuri, was elected Vice-Chairman; and Shashidhar Sinha was appointed the Honorary Treasurer.

The other members of the new Board of Governors are: Hemant Bakshi, Arvind Sharma, Dilip Cherian, S. K. Palekar, Jayant Singh, Subhash Kamath, Srinivasan Swamy, Rajan Anandan, Shantanu Khosla, Abanti Sankarnarayanan, I Venkat, Arunabh DasSharma & Partha Rakshit.

During the year 2013-14, the Consumer Complaints Council (CCC) met 41 times and considered complaints against 1937 advertisements. Of these, complaints against 1520 advertisements were upheld, while 414 were not upheld and 3 were considered non-issues.  In more than 90% of the cases, where a complaint against the advertisement was upheld, the advertisements have been voluntarily withdrawn or modified as per the CCC’s decisions.

Partha Rakshit, the outgoing Chairman of ASCI said, “Last year has been a very eventful and successful year for us. ASCI’s effective action towards reducing the complaint processing turnaround time to just 12 days has led ASCI to win the prestigious EASA Gold Award for Best Practices. There has also been more than 90% compliance towards the advertisements wherein a complaint against an advertisement was “upheld”. These advertisements were either withdrawn or have been appropriately modified. In a noteworthy achievement, ASCI issued guidelines on skin lightening & fairness products which ensured that these advertisements do not depict people with dark skin as somehow inferior to those who are fairer. Also recently, government took notice of ASCI’s efforts to curb Teleshopping Ads that violate ASCI Code and ensured a strict compliance of the advertising code in the Cable Television Networks Act (CTN).”

The incoming Chairman, Narendra Ambwani said, “There has been tremendous change in ASCI’s approach towards advertising content and adherence to the ASCI’s guidelines by the advertisers. Earlier, we acted primarily on complaint received from the public or the industry body. In the coming year, we hope to promote ASCI’s guidelines more vigorously among advertisers and creative agencies, so that new ads meet ASCI’s standards at the creative stage itself. We also hope to collaborate strongly with the regulators and consumer groups to ensure fairness and responsibility in advertising”.

He states that as consumer awareness about products, brands and media grows, they go onto become more demanding as to what should and can appear on the ads they are offered. The questioning nature of the consumers has increased over the years. “This, along with enhanced accessibility to the industry guards via new media is some of the things that all in the Council shall be looking forward in the coming months. However, I believe that dealing with new media is still something we need to get our foothold strong on as it is a domain, we have not really looked keenly as yet”.

He mentions that the Council is now taking steps to get close to consumers and industry member by building a strong social media availability, so as to escalate the rate of result and also strengthen the trust factor that the council is meant to weave in the industry fabric.