ASCI tastes victory twice at Global ICAS Awards 2025

New Delhi: The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has been awarded two awards during the International Council for Advertising Self-Regulation (ICAS) Global Dialogues Summit 2025 at the 2025 Global ICAS Awards.

The awards recognise ASCI Academy’s work in promoting responsible and progressive advertising through its work on DEI and “The Conscious Patterns” report: A study of deceptive patterns in top Indian apps.

Some of the work done by ASCI includes GenderNext in 2021, followed by the GenderGains whitepaper with Kantar. In 2023, ASCI conducted two studies, the Mainstreaming Diversity and Inclusiveness in Advertising report, released on December 7, 2023.

The second Excellence Award recognises the ASCI Academy’s study, "Conscious Patterns: A study of deceptive patterns in top Indian apps”. The study aims to establish the prevalence of dark patterns in India and develop the tools to measure and improve them.

Indian apps representing 21+ billion downloads were studied via 12000 screenshots. The study showed that 52 out of 53 top apps deployed dark patterns and that privacy deception was the most common dark pattern used in Indian apps. ASCI also collaborated with organisations like the Nasscom, Broadband India Forum, and the DPO Club.

A few of the report findings:

• 52 out of the 53 apps featured at least one deceptive pattern.

• Privacy deception emerged as the top violation, with a 79% prevalence. 

• The study revealed that 100% of e-commerce apps created barriers to account deletion and 80% of health-tech apps deployed false urgency tactics.

Manisha Kapoor, CEO and Secretary General, ASCI, accepted the award during the ICAS Global Dialogues Summit’s Day 1 held in Mumbai this year. The summit hosts self-regulatory organisations across 17+ ICAS member countries and global advertising associations. 

The summit explored topics including AI in advertising, masculinity and its representation, ensuring trust in digital ads, and the challenges and opportunities in shaping the advertising ecosystem.

Receiving the award, Kapoor said, “We are deeply honoured to receive this recognition. This award is a testament to ASCI’s efforts in making advertising more responsible and progressive in India. Working with expert partners and stakeholders has allowed us to create path-breaking work that we believe is very critical to the advertising ecosystem. We also congratulate the other SRO’s winners for their remarkable work.” 

The other awarded SROs were ASA UK for their work on sustainability, South Africa for their training course, Romania for best practices for influencer marketing,  Netherlands for their efforts for the influencer ecosystem, and Brazil won a special recognition award.