​Due diligence: On surrogate advertising

Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe ’s attempts to disrupt the marketing chain, by targeting the celebrities who prop up the brand recall of manufacturers’ products, is an encouraging counterpoise to the consumer goods advertising landscape of today. This landscape has long suffered the consequences of a gross asymmetry: the person with the persuasive power suffers almost none of the economic downsides of consuming certain goods, a situation sustained as much by uncritical endorsement as by inequities in the public health-care system. But the FDA must still prove its suspicions. According to it, Vimal Elaichi — which Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgn and Tiger Shroff have endorsed — does not have a market identity independent of its association with tobacco and that endorsing it amounts to a surrogate endorsement of tobacco products.