The latest round of advertisement wars between Internet job sites presents yet another challenge for the advertising industry. While the advertisements by TimesJobs do not mention Naukri.com by name, they have provoked the obvious reactions from the latter. In a statement, Naukri has disputed the manner in which TimesJobs classifies its "active jobs" and alleges it indulges in over-counting by classifying the same resume under multiple heads in a large number of cases. While Naukri can still come out with rival advertisements, there are larger issues that the advertising industry needs to grapple with. Indeed, this is by no means the only incident of firms putting out information in advertisements that rivals consider unfair. Indeed, the website of the Advertising Standards Council of India (www.ascionline.org) is full of advertisements that have offended someone for being inaccurate, offensive or misleading. In one case, for instance, a pizza manufactureradvertised its dough as being fresh and not made in a factory, unlike that of the competition"" the ASCI ruled the advertisement was misleading after a representation was made, and the advertisement was withdrawn. But the time that elapsed between the first advertisement and its withdrawal was four months. What makes things more complicated is that, in many cases, the facts themselves are a matter of dispute""in the media industry, the Audit Bureau of Circulation figures can't be correlated with those given by the National Readership Survey (NRS) or the Indian Readership Survey (IRS), and rivals claim victory based on different surveys! The ASC site has a case where one magazine claimed it was number one and, when this was found to be untrue according to two measures, the advertisement claim was modified. | |
| The instinctive reaction in such a case is to ask for regulation/certification"" get any advertisement making claims vetted by an independent agency prior to its publication/airing. Indeed, a trigger-happy government may even be inclined to accept such a suggestion. But this is really no solution since it places enormous powers in the hands of a new bureaucracy. The ASCI system is clearly working, albeit slowly. So ways need to be found to provide the ASCI with teeth. In the current year, the ASCI met 11 times to deliberate on 117 advertisements, and upheld 67 of the complaints. But, as the site says, "[t]he advertisements were in contravention of the ASCI code, (and) have failed to support (the) Council." One possible way to strengthen the ASCI process is to provide for damages. Since the purpose of misleading advertisements is to gain market share at someone else's expense, one possible solution is to allow the ASCI to provide for damages to the parties concerned, after it has investigated the case. The damages themselves could be in the form of money, or equivalent publicity. Indeed, no regulatory body, even if it is a self-regulatory one, is taken seriously unless it has the powers to compensate the aggrieved. This, of course, is also a wake-up call for the advertising industry and the service organisations that have come up to serve as data-collectors for it""if these bodies don't regulate themselves, someone else will. That, in fact, is also the ASCI's tagline. |
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