With digital advertising on the rise amidst the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the country, the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has partnered with TAM Media Research to add the monitoring of digital platforms to the already tracked print and television media under its National Advertising Monitoring Service (NAMS) for identifying potentially misleading advertisements.
As per ASCI, initially it will track the food and beverage, healthcare and education sectors on digital media since the three sectors accounted for 79% of the complaints processed by ASCI last year. With this, ASCI said, it will now be monitoring a media horizon that is estimated to have more than 80% of India’s advertising spend on it.
With digital advertising now accounting for 30% of the total media spends, and growing fast, this was the need of the hour, ASCI said in a statement. The variety of platforms covered spans search engines to video sites, news portals and websites for interests like astrology and automobiles.
We live in a world that’s becoming more digital by the day, so a lot of marketing is shifting to such platforms, Rohit Gupta, chairman, ASCI, said. “For a self-regulatory body, it makes sense to expand our monitoring of the offline space to include the online space as well,” he added further.
Established in 1985, The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) functions towards the cause of self-regulation in advertising, ensuring the protection of the interests of consumers. Formed with the support of all four sectors connected with advertising, such as advertisers, advertising agencies, media (including broadcasters and the press) and others like PR agencies, market research companies etc, ASCI looks into complaints across all media such as print, TV, radio, hoardings, SMS, emailers, internet, website, product packaging, brochures, promotional material among others.
Read Also: BARC India to mitigate the impact on TV viewership due to landing pages