Rajan Anandan, managing director and country head of Google India, has been inducted into the board of directors of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI). The move comes at a time when ASCI, the advertising industry’s self-regulatory body, is looking to strengthen the monitoring of online ads.
While digital advertising constitutes only three per cent of the Rs 29,000-crore advertising industry, it is growing at 60-70 per cent annually, double the growth rate reported last year. According to media experts, it is expected to touch six-seven per cent of total advertising in India by 2015-16. Given this growth, understanding the medium better is important, say ASCI officials.
Anandan's appointment, according to ASCI's chairman I Venkat, will help promote the cause of fair advertising practices online. This is because while the bulk of complaints received by ASCI are against print and TV ads, the proportion of online ads complained against is also growing.
Anandan is expected to help the body understand the finer aspects of online advertising, and help in formulating guidelines.
Anandan said, “The internet in India, which has over 100 million users, is quickly becoming a scale advertising medium for companies in many industries. Being on the board will quintessentially help ASCI and Google to jointly create awareness about fair advertising practices across a large bandwidth of consumer touch-points on the internet.”
Counted amongst the world's fastest growing technology companies, Google derives the bulk of its revenue from advertising alone. It closed the 2010 calendar year with revenue of $29.3 billion, of which 96 per cent came from advertising. Amongst its online services are the flagship search engine, Gmail, Adsense and Chrome.
