ASCI’S Nams Initiative bags a Silver at EASA 2013
Mumbai: The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has won the Best Practice Silver Award at the European Advertising Standards Alliance’s (EASA) Annual Meeting held in Milan, Italy recently.
The Council received this award for introducing the path-breaking initiative, National Advertising Monitoring Service (NAMS) in May 2012. ASCI had introduced NAMS to strengthen the process of tracking and reducing misleading advertisements which harm the interests of consumers.
The proactive monitoring by NAMS of print and TV ads has helped in tracking a much wider number of misleading ads month on month. In relative terms, the number of ads against which complaints were received and processed by ASCI has jumped nearly five-fold from 177 in 2011-2012 to 784 in 2012-2013. Clearly, the NAMS initiative has helped in strengthening the ad self-regulation and complaint redressal process manifold.
ASCI chairman Arvind Sharma said, “ASCI through NAMS has done path breaking work in tracking down and removing ads which make misleading, false or unsubstantiated claims. And the EASA Best Practice Silver award is recognition by the global ad Self Regulatory Organisations (SRO) that ASCI not only follows global best practices but also helps in innovating new ones. This recognition encourages us to further strengthen the professional and ethical standards in the ad industry to ensure responsible advertising and thereby protect the interests of the consumers.”
The EASA awards were organised around EASA’s annual general meetings held in Milan which include technical meetings on self-regulation best practice and a workshop on social media.
