Proposal to send celebs to jail for misleading ads decried

Should brand ambassadors be held liable for the product they endorse? If a Parliamentary panel has its way, celebrities could even be sent to jail if advertisements they are part of are found to be misleading.

The recommendation comes in the wake of Mahendra Singh Dhoni facing the ire of homebuyers of an Amrapali project in Delhi, which has got delayed.

That leads to the moot question: should celebrities be liable for the products they promote? After all, they are not responsible for manufacturing.

To obtain answers, CNBC-TV18's Nayantara Rai and Kritika Saxena spoke to Brand Consultant Harish Bijoor and Future Brands MD and CEO Santosh Desai.

Excerpts from the discussion.Nayantara: Where do you stand as far as a suggestion of the parliamentary panel goes? How much should a brand ambassador be held liable for, if at all? Should it not be the manufacturer or the owner of the brand that should be held liable more? Desai: As far as legal liability is concerned it is difficult to argue that the celebrity endorsing a product or a brand should be held liable. In so many cases, the kind of technical knowledge that is required to arrive at that judgement is not possible, it is not available with the individual in question. It is clearly the manufacturer and the brand advertisers responsibility. Having said that, it is important for celebrities to be mindful of the responsibility that they have to their public and therefore to act responsibly. It doesn't mean that that responsibility extends to their being liable for prosecution. But certainly, there is a moral responsibility on them that they need to be mindful of.

Bijoor: At this given point of time when a brand endorser decides to endorse a brand, it is a happy situation because somebody approaches him and then they sign and they move on. There isn’t too much of due diligence. I think that is the point that is being made. I am with the Parliamentary committee when it says you guys need to do a lot more due diligence because you need to be responsible.

There are two aspects, one is called wilful default and the other is witless default -- one is due to omission and the other is due to commission. So, both these aspects need to be taken care of and brand endorsers need to be very responsible in future.

Desai: I don't think that it makes any sense. You could argue that why shouldn't the publication or the media outlet that carries the advertisement, why should they not be held responsible?

If you are going to fix responsibility in any direction but the one where it belongs -- which is the advertiser -- I think then you can go anywhere. How do you determine who is a celebrity? It is very easy to say with Dhoni that he is a celebrity but there are enough number of actors/character players on television who are not celebrities.Nayantara: Given the fact who MS Dhoni is, his appeal, the way people look up to him. Should he not be more selective about who he decides to endorse. I live in the National Capital Region, why not select a builder which doesn’t have a trust deficit with the public or when this whole slander does takes place, I know he made a comment but why not just be more selective about the people that you decide to endorse, be more selective about the companies that you endorse, which is something that we do see happening in the west.Bijoor: Yeah or for that matter why select a builder at all, because I think a person like Dhoni with his kind of stature and the kinds of brands that he does endorse. What really happen is selectivity needs to come in, because if you are not selective this is going to happen. So I think what the Parliamentary’s committee suggestion now tells people is, “Hey listen guys you be careful. Now if you have decided to advertise for somebody then you are going to be blamed for it as well, because there is a point out here and the point simply is that you are a stakeholder. There are end numbers of stakeholders; the manufacturer is a stakeholder, the manufacturer who advertise is the stakeholder, the advertising agency in between is really not the stakeholder so much, because they are not putting out their name in a very solid manner, but the brand endorser is, because when a consumer comes to buy your brand”. He looks at Dhoni and says, “I love Dhoni and Dhoni loves this, which means that I love this”, so I think the equation is a very simplistic one I am putting up, but it’s a point that we need to remember that the brand endorser is a stakeholder and very careful stakeholder in the future, hopefully.Nayantara: You think people would be buying homes just because MS Dhoni endorses a particular developer. Is it really as simplistic as that and that brings me to the next question. I know Amrapali is not listed, but in the past we have seen listed companies have brand ambassadors, for example, we saw Shahrukh Khan being endorsing DLF which was then a listed company. Why spend all of these money on celebrities because anyone really going to buy a home saying my favourite movie star or my favourite cricketer endorses this company.Desai: Well obviously the person who are spending the money on the celebrity believes that celebrity will play a role, so I think to that extent given the fact that the widespread prevalence of celebrities in advertising suggests that there is some correlation between their appearing in ads and sales going up, so I don’t think that’s the issue. I think it is very important here when we talked about legal liability it is not the same thing as responsibility and feeling responsible and being selective. These are all matters of judgment. What we are talking about is a matter of law and a punitive action that is being taken against celebrities and I think that is absolutely crossing the lines. I don’t think this is a matter of sending out a message or sending out a signal. This is actually holding somebody responsible for something that they do not have control over, that they do not in many cases have the ability to judge whether that is right or wrong. It is squarely the manufacturer’s responsibility and nobody else’s as far as the law is concerned. On that personally I am very very clear.