Most VDA Ad Violations Related To Lack Of Disclosures By Influencers: ASCI Report

At a time when influencer marketing in India is drawing flak over several controversies, influencers led the chart for violation of the Advertising Standard Council of India’s (ASCI’s) guidelines on advertisements for virtual digital assets (VDAs) in 2021-22. 

According to an ASCI report, most advertisements that were looked into under the sector were influencer disclosure cases where influencers talked about how to navigate the VDA platforms, or sharing information about the category and how the platform is easy to operate.

For the uninitiated, VDAs are a subset of digital assets that are transacted on blockchain, including crypto and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Overall, 394 advertisements were looked into this category during 2021-22. Of these advertisements, 98% were digital and 95% required modification. More importantly, 385 ads were related to influencer disclosure violations.

In 2021, the crypto exchanges in India upped their marketing budget significantly. Moving beyond digital ads, some of the exchanges launched television commercials as well. Some of the top exchanges, such as CoinDCX and Coinswitch Kuber, roped in Bollywood celebrities as brand ambassadors. However, no ads featuring celebrities were found to be misleading, the report said.

The leadership and consumer trust claims were most common among the misleading ads, followed by guaranteed earnings, performance comparisons with other modes of investments like gold and stock investment. Besides, the other common claims revolved around promoting the category through referral programmes such as refer a friend and win.

Among the VDA platforms, online trading platform Binomo accounted for 296 ads of the 373 ads that ASCI took action on. Top exchanges such as CoinDCX, CoinSwitch Kuber, WazirX,  accounted for 45, 9 and 2 ads, respectively. 

Last month, ASCI released its annual compliance report for April 2021-March 2022. Out of the 5,532 total ads processed during the period, VDA ads accounted for 8%. 

Earlier, ASCI chief executive Manisha Kapoor reportedly said that some influencers talk confidently about crypto without even fully understanding it, eventually creating an impression that it is safe and fine to invest in crypto.

ASCI also released a set of advertising guidelines in February 2022 for crypto entities and other VDAs, seeking to promote their products and services through advertising in media. The guidelines came into effect on April 1.

Recently, many also questioned the credibility of financial influencers when asset-backed lending and borrowing platform Vauld shut its operations in India. At that time four top YouTubers – P.R. Sundar, Ankur Warikoo, Akshat Shrivastava, and Anish Singh Thakur – received criticism for promoting Vauld. 

However, Thakur, who runs Booming Bulls YouTube channel, claimed that he always mentions that he does not give any investment advice and asks investors to do their own research, as per a Mint report. However, Warikoo noted that creators like him need to be more cautious about promotions through their content.