"At the Board meeting of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) held today, Narendra Ambwani, Director, Agro Tech Foods Ltd, was unanimously elected Chairman of the Board of ASCI," the industry watchdog said in a statement.
"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," Ambwani said.
Other members of the new Board of Governors include 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 and Partha Rakshit.
ASCI said that during the year 2013-14, the Consumer Complaints Council (CCC) met 41 times and considered complaints against 1,937 advertisements.
Of these, complaints against 1,520 advertisements were upheld, while 414 were not upheld and 3 were considered non-issues.
"In more than 90 per cent of the cases, where a complaint against the advertisement was upheld, the advertisements have been voluntarily withdrawn or modified as per the CCC's decisions," ASCI said.