Advertisers can now rest assured that complaints made to the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) will not take ages to get resolved. The advertising body is putting in place a fast-track mechanism to resolve disputes between advertisers. The process, the draft of which has already been prepared, will help resolve the disputes in 10 days from the current 45. This is likely to bring cheer to a number of advertisers who have frequently complained that the advertising body is simply too slow when acting on complaints.
The tatkal (fast-track) system, according to Bharat Patel, member of the consultative committee of ASCI, will be in force in about two to three months. “The system is being discussed by the ASCI board. Once that is completed, whatever changes have to be made to the draft, will be done, and then the system will be implemented,” he says.
The system, among other things, will stress on a face-to-face meeting between the complainant and the advertiser against whom the complaint has been made. This, according to Patel, will help speed the process. In the current system, once a complaint is received from an advertiser, ASCI proceeds to first write to the party against whom the complaint has been made. Once the other side presents its point of view, the issue is then brought up at the Consumer Complaints Council of ASCI, which after going through the facts of the matter, gives its verdict.
Besides serving as a quicker mode of resolution of disputes, the system is also likely to save advertisers the trouble of moving the courts in pursuit of speedy redressal.
In cases of disparagement, for instance, aggrieved parties in the past have not only approached ASCI but also moved the courts to prevent the other side from publishing or airing the ads. This has often resulted in lengthy legal battles that have gone on well after the ad campaign has run its course.
For instance, advertisers GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare and Heinz have been fighting a dispute concerning disparagement for quite a few years now. Both players compete in the health food drink space with Horlicks and Complan, respectively. While the latter has consistently made the promise that kids can get taller with its 23 vital nutrients. GSK, in 2005, hit back with its ‘Taller, Stronger, Sharper’ campaign, which said kids could not only get taller but also stronger in body and sharper in mind after drinking Horlicks, citing a study conducted by the Hyderabad-based National Institute of Nutrition.
Subsequent ads by GSK spoke about how kids could achieve this above at a price lower than competition. Heinz came back with both print ads and television commercials denying these claims, directly drawing comparisons between Horlicks and Complan. The matter landed in court, with the Supreme Court recently rejecting GSK’s plea to stay the Delhi High Court division bench’s order that suspended its single judge’s decision to restrain Heinz from airing or publishing ads that disparaged it. The division bench of the Delhi High Court will now hear the appeals on injunction applications made by the advertisers.
More From This Section
The situation is said to be no different between Hindustan Unilever and Procter & Gamble, who continue to slug it out in court over an issue concerning disparagement of the latter’s Tide brand by the former. “Even as we encourage more people to complain, the idea is to resolve disputes as quickly as possible as far intra-industry complaints go. The tatkal system should help,” Patel says.
Intra-industry complaints or complaints made by one advertiser against another at ASCI have seen a sharp rise from 25 per cent to 35-40 per cent. The reasons range from plagiarism to disparagement to claims that appear tall.