Mumbai: Goafest 2022 kicked off with a bang after a two-year pause at Goa’s Grand Hyatt Hotel on Thursday, featuring some of the industry’s brightest minds along with the industry awards felicitating notable creative thinkers from South Asia. This year marks the advertising, media and marketing symposium’s 15th edition.

The day one of the adfest saw an interesting mix of panels and speaker sessions with bristling conversations. There was also a knowledge session in partnership with the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), wherein the ministry of consumer affairs & food distribution secretary (CA) Rohit Kumar Singh spoke with Ogilvy India chairman of global creative Ogilvy and Worldwide and executive chairman Piyush Pandey on consumer safety. The panel discussed the importance of consumer protection and the responsibility that we have as professionals. The session was moderated by ASCI chairman and BBH India CEO Subhash Kamath who asked some pertinent questions regarding brands promoting and marketing misleading information, bait advertising, and those compromising consumer interest.

"Conceptually, creativity by its very nature doesn’t like boundaries, constantly looking at pushing the envelope and thinking out of the box," observed Kamath, kicking off the session. “And yet consumer protection does require some responsibilities and boundaries to reign it in. So can creative ideas and consumer safety coexist and go hand in hand?"

Singh spoke about how the keyword is that creativity is not "misleading " the consumer and taking him for a ride, adding that the moment it crosses that line "we need to intervene."

“Creativity should raise the bar without crushing or at the expense of someone else’s life," weighed in Pandey. "If you cannot show any piece of communication to your family then you can't show it to anyone else’s family."

"Now, with the CPA 2020 (Consumer Protection Act) in place over the last few years, what are the priorities of the government from the consumer protection perspective, what are the things that you would really keep your eye on."

Singh spoke about firstly focusing on brands making tall claims and leading the consumer with false expectations and the second is on bait advertising. We have to impose penalties on such brands who try to fool the vulnerable consumer with misleading claims.

He explained how in the new paradigm that has emerged in the past few years, there is a mad race for Customer acquisition and valuations, what is getting compromised is probably “consumer interests.” “And that is the only thing of concern for us, whether you are compromising consumer interest?”

"While there is increased consumer awareness today, there’s also an increased risk of vulnerability with the consumer’s data, because their entire data is now available to marketers," observed Kamath.

"When they shop, what they do. The data that comes out is mined and those insights and that mining of those in favor leading to performing targeted marketing so is there something that we need to look at for protection from targeted marketing with data mining as well," Kamath maintained.

Singh said that unless a customer has permitted you to use their data, one cannot use that data. “The Data Protection Bill is before the parliament. And that will define the boundaries of what data can be shared, and widely covers all. You cannot share my data without my permission,” he emphasised.

Singh also called out the taxi aggregators Uber and Ola on their unfair pricing algorithms. “Just last week, I personally issued notices to, I said your algorithms, cancellation charges, and the way you calculate fields are not fair,” adding that here it is literally about taking the consumer for a ride! “If we don’t look out for consumer interests, who will?” he asked.

Singh also spoke about making the grievance redressal system more robust. The national consumer helpline gets over 4000 calls every day and over the last four years, analytics showed that calls pertaining to e-commerce have grown from eight per cent to 44 per cent. “Now, that means there's something wrong somewhere in this rat race for customer acquisition. Something is going wrong somewhere,” he asserted.

Appreciating that the administration was trying to have a dialogue with the rule violators, Piyush Pandey said it is heartening that the government is trying to have a more robust system in place by guiding and cautioning, rather than by ruling with fear. Speaking about creativity in advertising, he said, "Creativity is about touching millions of hearts, sometimes in three seconds. The consumer is not a moron who can get influenced easily."