Ensuring compliance from small, unknown players is a challenge: Abanti Sankaranarayanan, ASCI Chairperson

Abanti Sankaranarayanan, Chief Strategy and Corporate Affairs officer, Diageo India, was elected as the new Chairman of Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) at the 31st Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the industry body on Thursday. She succeeds Srinivasan K. Swamy, chairman and managing director, RK Swamy BBDO. exchange4media caught up with Shankarnarayanan on the sidelines of the 31st ASCI AGM.

Following are the excerpts from the interview.

What is your vision for the next one year?

I want to build on the strong foundation that ASCI has put together in the last few years, in particular last year. I think that with the abilities, processes and partnerships that we have established we need to stay the course and consolidate these developments while staying true to our vision that we are a body that encourages self-regulation and enables the public at large to trust advertisers.

ASCI’s biggest drawback is not having the authority to demand compliance…

Self-regulation in advertising is like self-regulation in any sphere of life - it is always a work in progress. I think we have made huge strides, particularly in the last year. We processed nearly 2300 advertisements, which is the largest ever number of complaints. I think that is a reflection of the fact that self-regulation is working. Do we have to do more? Absolutely, we have to, because it is a process that needs to continue. Do we have the tools, be that the mobile app or the other digital tools and assets that we have created? We do. So, that’s what I mean by consolidation. This is a process that needs to be cultivated. And I therefore feel that self-regulation is absolutely working and we have to continue the journey.

What is your opinion the government’s intervention when it comes to the regulation of advertising? Can ASCI work in tandem with a government body?

Government regulation obviously has a key role to play, but of the advertisers and the industry at large self-regulates and ASCI as an objective credible body is able to play the role that it has to then to that extent it actually reduces that need for government to step in and regulate. Working with the government bodies and ministries that we currently do, allows us to bring in both regulation and self-regulation.

What are some of the key suggestions that have come forward on improving ASCI?

Making sure that we have a very credible and objective CCC is very important because it is forums where the decisions are taking. How fast can we process complaints, and the third, ASCI bringing its expertise to suo-moto monitoring of advertising.

For the shoot and scoot violators, how can ASCI reduce processing time to rein them in?

That is something we need to think about. There is a minimum time that we will take to process a complaint. During the last year we met 46 times to deliberate over advertisements. The fact that the process has to be thoughtful and rigorous means that it will take a minimum number of days, otherwise we will not be doing justice to something that can be potentially disruptive to an advertiser. The fact that we met 46 times last year is testimony that we are trying to accelerate the processing time.

What have been the major challenges when it comes to compliance?

For example, a large number of offending ads are in the education category. Many of these are relatively small companies that are hard to track down. I think when there are small unknown players in certain industries that tend to be a bigger challenge than if the advertiser is a well-known organised company. Those companies are easier to sway.

Social media is now a marketing tool in its own right...

As I said, we want build on whatever processes we have already created. These are some of the areas we will be looking at

The ASCI celebrity endorsement guidelines define a celebrity as one who is paid Rs 20 lakh or more for an endorsement. How can ASCI bring emerging marketing avenues like influencer marketing under its purview? Influencers may not be paid Rs 20 lakh, but they are celebrities in their own right.

When we came up with the celebrity endorsement guidelines, we had to define celebrity by a few parameters, otherwise it becomes very open-ended. Anything else which does not come under definition of celebrity will get covered through the codes that ASCI has. Even if the influencer is not a celebrity, the advertiser will need to follow the ASCI codes.