India’s Advertising Standards Council has pulled up 15 companies for running ad campaigns that violated the council’s codes. The guilty included Reliance Communications and Idea Cellular and fast moving consumer goods player Dabur and Elder Pharma.
Reliance Communications will have to suspend a TV commercial as it failed to substantiate its claim “with comparative data of other mobile services that the company offers the fastest mobile broadband service in India”.
The company said it would change the ad soon.
Another mobile operator, Idea Cellular, also had to modify its commercial, which showed people walking, while talking on mobile phones, as the advertising council upheld complaint from consumers that it encouraged “the unsafe act of walking while talking on the mobile phone”. Dabur had to modify two of its TV commercials labelled misleading by the council. The two ads were that of Dabur Vatika shampoo, which claimed that the product eliminates dandruff from first wash and that of Dabur Lal Oil which said massaging with the oil leads to doubly faster growth in babies.
The council also found Elder Pharma’s campaign of showing a woman unbuttoning a shirt in an advertisement of deodorant, Fuel, to be vulgar.
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