The advertising standards council of India (ASCI) has issued its guidelines for explaining or limiting claims made in advertisements, and for disclaimers made in supporting. The ASCI require that suitable information or disclaimers need to be used to properly support and explain the claim made in advertisements to make sure that customers can read all the information presented.
ASCI has processed over 800 ads which were found to be in violation of the disclaimer guidelines, in the past three years. In a recent survey, ASCI surveyed 130 consumers and it observed that
80 percent of the respondents did not notice the declaimers and guidelines displayed during ads.
62 percent of the respondents think that the disclaimers in the ads were too long.
Even after adequate exposure time has been provided, still, 33 percent of respondents did not understand the disclaimers clearly.
According to the consumer complaints council (CCC), during their meeting, they observed that many times, the frame of the ads that contain the disclaimer was very distracted and crowded for the viewer to focus. The guidelines for disclaimers made in explaining, limiting, or supporting the claims made in ads have been amended by ASCI after consulting with the board members, to address the viewer’s issue. The significant points added to the existing guidelines are as follows:
The use of disclaimers made in ads needs to be minimum s that viewers can understand it easily. Otherwise complex and long disclaimers with difficult words and large blocks of text are a deterrent to consumers viewing and reading the contents of disclaimers. In these cases, advertisers should modify the headline claim to decrease the need for further qualification through disclaimers. Readability and hold duration of disclaimers in the video ads on digital media and on television commercials, all disclaimers need to be clearly readable to the viewer.
In a single frame in an ad: there should not be more than one disclaimer in one ad. The disclaimer needs to have remained on screen for more than 4 seconds for every line and be restricted to two full-length lines.
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