ASCI wins Gold at Global EASA Best Practice Awards 2014

The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has won the Gold Award at the Global EASA Best Practice Awards 2014. The European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) presented this award to ASCI at their bi -annual meeting held in Amsterdam.

According to EASA this prestigious prize was awarded to ASCI "for significantly reducing the average time it takes to handle complaints". Elaborating further on this EASA stated, "The ASCI put in place actions to substantially reduce the journey time of complaints – from their first point of contact with the Secretariat, through the Consumer Complaints Council (CCC) and on to the transmission of the final decision to the advertiser and complainant."

The initiatives taken by ASCI have helped to make it an efficient regulatory body. With prompt and efficient processing of complaints ASCI reduced the lead time of Complaints Processing from an average of 45 days in 2011 to 28 days in 2012 to 12 days presently. The other key measures taken by ASCI include  introduction of Suspension Pending Investigation (SPI)  which allows ASCI to order the removal of an extremely objectionable Ad immediately while investigation is pending on the matter, expansion from one to two Consumer Complaints Councils (CCC's) which enables weekly meetings instead of the earlier practice of holding bimonthly in 2013 and monthly meetings in 2012, thus leading to  a faster response time to complaints and tracking of upheld complaint ads.

Partha Rakshit, Chairman, ASCI, elated with this achievement said, “ASCI is thrilled to learn that it has won the prestigious Gold Award for 2013. Last year we won the EASA Silver Awards for the National Advertising Monitoring Service (NAMS) initiative which started tracking most of the print and TV ads in India. That award spurred us to focus on improving ASCI’s effectiveness and credibility as a SRO delivering speedier redressal of complaints and higher compliance of its decisions, which has got the Gold this year. Various Government departments now recognize and support our self- regulation work by including ASCI's code and representation in the rules and committees established to regulate advertising content respectively. We are very grateful to EASA for recognizing our work and for advice & encouragement they, along with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), provide to ASCI. I thank my colleagues on the ASCI Board, its Consultative Committee, the CCC and the Secretariat who together have made this achievement possible."

The European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) is a non-profit organization based in Brussels and is the single voice of advertising self-regulation in Europe. It acts as the European coordination point for advertising self-regulatory bodies and systems across Europe. EASA also brings together SROs from European countries as well as SROs in India, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.  

The EASA Best Practice Award is presented each year to the self-regulatory organization that has most effectively implemented an element of the EASA Best Practice Model – a set of operational standards for advertising standards bodies. The jury is composed of representatives from the advertising industry associations (advertisers, agencies and media) in membership of EASA.

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