Mumbai, March 18 All stakeholders need to come together to address ethical issues concerning influencer marketing, which is estimated to be around Rs 4,000 crore, said a senior government official on Wednesday.
Sanjay Jaju, the secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, said that the government and all the stakeholders need to look at the concerns from the point of view of consumers.
"We need to really address ethical concerns when it comes to influencer marketing. Questions of disclosures, questions of authenticity and questions of accountability," he said, addressing an event organized by the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI).
Drawing from studies done by the self-regulatory body, Jaju said the issues are not marginal, but systemic.
"Therefore, all of us together in the government and in the industry and in the industry bodies will have to do a course correction," he said.
He said influencer marketing has grown at a compounded rate of 80 per cent over the last few years, and is a Rs 4,000 crore industry now.
Jaju also flagged the issue of advertisements flowing into India from offshore destinations, pointing out that the government has found out that a "bulk" of investment and employment-related scam ads have their origins outside India.
"It will require responses across law, platform governance, cyber enforcement and obviously the self-regulatory frameworks," he said.
Growing usage of artificial intelligence (AI), while helping drive up efficiencies, poses "huge risks" for advertising, he said, adding that the technology is being used to industrialise fraud, not for improving advertising.
"The line between legitimate persuasion and an engineered deception, which is happening now, is becoming thinner and thinner. It will be very difficult for an ordinary user to understand where the camouflage is," he said.
Later in the day, Jaju visited the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies and urged the body to play a leading role in nurturing India's creative talent ecosystem, as per an official statement.
He held detailed discussions with the institute's leadership about its strategic roadmap, focused on ways to scale up academic programmes and infrastructure.
Jaju said that 150 students have started their study programmes at the institute, and the goal is to increase that number to 400 by July. He added that 20 startups will also start working out of the institute located in the NFDC complex by then.
A larger campus for IICT will soon be developed in suburban Goregaon's Film City, and classes will begin there in 2028, he said.