Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Among Others Hauled Up For Misleading Ads

Patanjali’s advertisement campaigns have been hauled up for being “misleading by exaggeration.”

Advertising watchdog Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has pulled up consumer giants Patanjali Ayurved, PepsiCo and Britannia among others, for running misleading advertisement campaigns.

The Customer Complaints Council (CCC) of ASCI received 155 complaints in May, out of which it upheld 109 cases, it said in a statement.

It upheld 10 complaints against yoga guru Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Ayurved for products such as Jeera Biscuit, Kacchi Ghani mustard oil, Kesh Kanti and Dant Kanti, among others.

The advertising regulator had earlier upheld six cases against Patanjali in April and March 2016.

Patanjali Ayurved failed to substantiate its claim before the regulator regarding ads for the concerned products and CCC upheld them “as misleading by exaggeration”.

Patanjali, however, questioned the manner in which the decisions were passed and alleged that some rival MNCs are behind the move.

They (ASCI) do not have any expert on ayurveda and are deciding the matter. They do not have any fact finding procedure or a laboratory and decide the case in a meeting only.

Patanjali spokesperson

ASCI also pulled up beverage major PepsiCo India for its campaign ‘Har bottle par Paytm Cash pakka’ as it was “misleading and luring the consumers to buy Pepsi bottles, with a minimum hope of getting some cash back through Paytm.”

The advertisement itself does not clarify the main condition for the offer of it being mobile number specific. Also, the disclaimers in the advertisement were not in the same language as that of the voice over.

ASCI statement

Britannia Industries’ claim of “100 percent whole wheat bread” was found to be:

misleading by ambiguity as the whole wheat content in the product (Whole Wheat Bread) is in the range of 50 percent to 65 percent and other solid content in the product is coming from other sources.

Pizza Hut, Flipkart, Amazon are also among others pulled up for misleading advertising.

(With inputs from PTI)