The Hindu Business Line : Bharat Patel re-elected Chairman of ISA

AT the Executive Council meeting held on September 23, following the Annual General Meeting, Mr Bharat V. Patel, Chairman, Procter & Gamble Hygiene and Health Care Ltd, was unanimously re-elected Chairman of the Indian Society of Advertisers for the third consecutive year.

Mr Patel has been an active member of the Executive Council since 1991 and held the position of the Chairman of the Managing Committee since 1994, before being elected as Chairman of the Executive Council in 2002.

Mr Kurush Grant, Divisional Chief Executive, India Tobacco Division, ITC Ltd, Mr Bijou Kurien, COO, Watches, Titan Industries Ltd and Mr Virat Mehta, VP, Nestle India Ltd were elected Vice-Chairmen of East, South and North respectively, while Mr Romit Chaterji, VP, Corporate Affairs, Tata Services Ltd, was elected as Honorary Treasurer.

Mr Dalip Sehgal, ED, Hindustan Lever, was elected as the Chairman of the Media Committee.

The other members of the newly elected Executive Council are: Mr Hamid Ahmed (Hamdard), Mr Amitabh (LIC), Mr J.C. Chopra (Consultant and Member Emeritus), Mr Debanjan Datta (Crompton Greaves), Ms Paulomi Dhawan (Raymond), Mr Rajiv Dube (Tata Motors), Mr Vinay Hegde (Colgate-Palmolive), Mr Naveen Kshatriya (Castrol), Mr Jagmohan Malhotra (Enterprise For New Directions), Mr B.O. Mehta (Pidilite), Mr Rajiv Pal (Birla VXL) Mr R. Ramakrishnan (Bajaj Electricals), Mr K.S. Ramesh (CavinKare), Mr Dalip Sehgal (Hindustan Lever) and Mr Brahm Vasudeva (Hawkins).

The ISA represents the interests of advertisers in the country and its membership accounts for around two-thirds 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.

In his AGM address, Mr Patel highlighted two major concerns that the advertisers are facing in India, as well as worldwide.

First, 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 such as 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 is of `engaging' the consumer and inducing `action'. He said the World Federation of Advertisers has recently launched an initiative by issuing a blueprint 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.

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