MUMBAI: Bharat V Patel, chairman, Procter & Gamble Hygiene and Health Care Limited, has been unanimously re-elected chairman of the Indian Society of Advertisers, for the third consecutive year.
Patel's re-election took place on 23 September at the ISA's executive council meeting, which was held after the AGM. He has been an active member of the Executive Council since 1991and held the position of the chairman of the managing committee since 1994, before being elected chairman in 2002.
Among the others elected were Kurush Grant, divisional chief executive - India Tobacco Division, ITC Limited, Bijou Kurien, COO - watches, Titan Industries and Virat Mehta, vice-president, Nestle India as vice-chairmen of East, South and North, respectively. Romit Chaterji vice-president - corporate affairs, Tata Services was elected treasurer and Dalip Sehgal, executive director, Hindustan Lever, was elected chairman of the media committee.
In his AGM address, Patel highlighted two major concerns that advertisers are facing in India, as well as worldwide. Firstly, the rapidly declining cost effectiveness of TV advertising due to a simultaneous proliferation of programmes /channels leading to declining viewership, combined with the increase in rates, was a major issue engaging the advertising community across the globe. He talked about the various experiments being undertaken worldwide by some big advertisers to use alternative audio-visual vehicles like the Internet and encouraged Indian Advertisers to look at such options critically.
The second big concern was to do with the questions being raised about whether the current yardsticks which measure media audiences were actually measuring what they should be measuring - that of 'engaging' the consumer and inducing 'action'. He pointed out that the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), of which the ISA is a member, has recently launched an initiative by issuing a blue print for consumer-centric holistic measurement of media audiences. He expected to see some major changes in measurement logic and systems to get established in the foreseeable future.
Other members of the newly elected EC are: Hamid Ahmed (Hamdard), Amitabh (LIC), JC Chopra (consultant and member emeritus), Debanjan Datta (Crompton Greaves), Paulomi Dhawan (Raymond), Rajiv Dube (Tata Motors), Vinay Hegde (Colgate-Palmolive), Naveen Kshatriya (Castrol), Jagmohan Malhotra (Enterprise For New Directions), BO Mehta (Pidilite), Rajiv Pal (Birla VXL) R. Ramakrishnan (Bajaj Electricals), K.S Ramesh (CavinKare), Dalip Sehgal (Hindustan Lever) and Brahm Vasudeva (Hawkins).
The ISA is the only body which represents the interests of Advertisers in the country and its membership accounts for around 2/3rds of national advertising expenditures.
During the past year the ISA has been instrumental in convincing the government to allow the setting off of service taxes on advertising, sales promotions and market research expenditures against CENVAT, thereby eliminating the cascading and double taxation effect on such expenditures.
It was also a proactive participant in a joint representation by Advertisers, Advertising Agencies and media representatives to the information & broadcasting ministry in having the ASCI code being accepted as the determining code with respect to violation of the Cable TV Act, in preference to a separate code being set up by the government for this purpose. The ISA is one of the founder-promoters of the ASCI.
During the course of the last year, the media committee of the ISA, through discussions with All India Radio, was able to get them to defer a proposal to drastically increase their tariffs.
