Surrogate advertising

Also called: Surrogate ads · Topic: Consumer Rights and Consumer Protection · NCERT: Beyond NCERT

Meaning

Surrogate advertising is a way to promote a product that the law does not allow to be advertised. The company advertises a different, legal product that carries the same brand name. "Surrogate" means a stand-in. The legal product appears in the ad, but the real aim is to keep the banned product's brand in buyers' minds. This gets around the purpose of the ban without breaking its exact words. That is why consumer and health regulators treat it as a form of misleading advertising.

Example

COTPA 2003 bans tobacco advertising in India. Pan masala without tobacco can still be advertised, so some companies run ads for it under the same brand name as their tobacco product, and viewers link the ad to the tobacco brand. The Central Consumer Protection Authority's June 2022 guidelines on misleading advertisements set rules on surrogate ads. A 2023 national consultation on smokeless tobacco recommended amending COTPA's Schedule I to end this practice.

Don't confuse with

• Misleading advertisement: this makes false or deceptive claims about the product being shown. A surrogate ad may say nothing false about the pan masala. Its problem is that it promotes a different, banned product.
• Disguised ads (a dark pattern): these are ads made to look like normal content, such as a news item or a review, so users do not see that they are ads. A surrogate ad is openly an ad. What it hides is which product it is really selling.

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• Consumer Rights and Consumer Protection