The International Council for Advertising Self Regulation (ICAS), a global organisation that promotes responsible advertising, is closely looking at emerging areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and influencer marketing. ICAS members including self-regulatory bodies such as the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), that work towards implementation of effective self-regulation norms across markets.
Guy Parker, President, ICAS told businessline that ICAS has set up a working group to focus on AI and its implications in advertising in terms of transparency and trust.
“While everyone is talking about AI and its impact, we are particularly interested in looking at it from one lens and that is transparency and other aspects such as implications of labelling of AI generated ads. As higher proportions of ads get generated using AI, one need to see whether or not all such ads, if it is not violating any regulations, need to be labelled. Whether such labels will make consumers more suspicious of these ads and that is the very opposite of what we want. We focus on responsible advertising and want consumers to trust ads. Hence, we are exploring various nuances surrounding ads and AI.”
Manisha Kapoor, Secretary General & CEO, Advertising Standards Council of India
This comes at a time when self-regulatory bodies across the world are grappling with the impact of fast-evolving technological changes.
“ASCI is an active member of ICAS especially as it is looking at some of the emerging areas. We are part of the working group that is evaluating the impact of AI on advertising. So, through ICAS we constantly engage with our counterparts and look at key learnings while we are developing our own codes,” added Manisha Kapoor, Secretary General and CEO, ASCI.
Parker, who is also the Chief Executive of UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, said that ICAS is also working on coming out with global guidance on influencer marketing.
“We will be publishing this piece of work soon for the World Federation of Advertisers on influencer advertising. This is an example of how ICAS is trying to encourage and promote more consistency on issues in terms of self-regulatory practices implemented across markets even as there will be differences in each market,” he added.
Asked about the evolving role of self-regulatory bodies in the era of digitisation, Parker said that global tech platforms clearly have a big stake in ensuring proliferation of responsible advertising. “So we are continuing to partner more deeply with the global platforms to ensure responsible online advertising,” he noted.
“We have seen improvement in terms of compliance of our codes in the digital advertising space. While there will continue to be challenges, as digital advertising has a lot more players and micro-advertisers. But our focus is on working in cooperation with all the stakeholders of the ecosystem to find long-term solutions,” Kapoor added.
The ICAS Global Dialogues event is being held in Mumbai.
