A drinkable sunscreen and a roll-on pen claiming to “balance cortisol”. Offshore betting ads woven into cricket reels and influencer pages, vanishing during takedowns only to resurface under new aliases. In FY26, India’s advertising landscape felt less like a regulated market and more like a moving target.
According to the self-regulatory ad body Advertising Standards Council of India’s (ASCI’s) Annual Complaints Report 2025-26, accessed exclusively by Mint, misleading ads have become more complex and digital, and harder to contain. While health, wellness, and personal care claims grew increasingly sophisticated and hard to challenge in real time, offshore betting and gaming emerged as the year's greatest enforcement hurdle.
Four-year trend data from ASCI showed how violations have evolved alongside India’s shift to digital-first media consumption. The number of betting and gaming advertisements found in violation of ASCI’s code surged from 1,336 in FY24 to 6,933 in FY26. Meanwhile, food and beverage, personal care, and healthcare remained among the largest sources of misleading claims related to wellness, immunity and mental health benefits.
Of all the violations found, 93% came from ASCI’s proactive work, mainly through its digital ad monitoring system, while 7% related to complaints received from consumers and other complainants.
The new science of selling
The report pointed to a broader shift: violations are no longer limited to exaggerated claims or missing disclosures, and are increasingly moving into potentially harmful or illegal categories, particularly across influencer-led digital ecosystems.
Unlike earlier miracle-cure advertising, many new-age claims reside in regulatory grey areas, using scientific-sounding language, wellness jargon and selective data to imply benefits without explicitly stating them.
Unrealistic timelines and transformative outcomes dominate the landscape. Advertisements frequently promise dramatic results within implausibly short timelines: dandruff gone in “one wash”, acne reversal in “six hours”, dark circles fading in “seven days”, or skin looking “five years younger in five days”. These claims create unrealistic expectations and strongly influence consumer decisions, despite lacking adequate qualification or substantiation, ASCI said.
Hyper-specific promises such as “23,800 new hair strands”, “220% plaque reduction,” or a “163% serotonin boost” frequently rest on weak evidence, using selective data or ingredient-level research that fails to prove the actual efficacy of the finished product, the report added.
Manisha Kapoor, CEO and secretary general of ASCI, told Mint, “Self-regulation can be more agile… but there are willful violators and repeat offenders, and for those, the law has to come in and create deterrence. Brands may be technically compliant, but we still find that [their claims are] misleading to consumers.”
The tension between technical compliance and consumer harm runs through much of the report. ASCI highlighted a growing number of wellness-led claims borrowing scientific language to sell everyday products. Healthcare, food and personal care continued to attract a large share of complaints, but the language of wellness is now spreading far beyond traditional health products.
“The food and beverage sector requires immediate, stronger pre-publication guardrails and an industry-wide reckoning that health claims carry real-world consequences for consumers’ physical wellbeing,” the report said. Earlier this month, Mint reported how the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India moved against clean-label food company The Whole Truth over its “no added sugar” claims after a rival complained.
Karthik Srinivasan, an independent advertising expert, said wellness language has become a widespread marketing code, shaped partly by post-pandemic anxieties around immunity, gut health and mental wellbeing. “The demand signal here is real and growing. The second factor is the direct-to-consumer boom flooding the market with brands that don't have traditional research & development infrastructure or legacy compliance teams. They are going to market quickly, especially on digital, where the friction to publish is near zero,” he said.
“Manufactured scientific precision”, he added, gives brands believable numbers that consumers are unlikely to verify while scrolling social media. “A specific number feels credible. It signals that someone ran a study.” In many cases, Srinivasan said, the line between compliance and consumer impact has blurred. “There is compliance versus what is curbable… sometimes brands are compliant but are still trying to see how far they can go,” Kapoor added.
Betting ads outpace enforcement
If wellness claims are becoming harder to verify, betting and gaming promotions are becoming harder to contain. ASCI’s data showed offshore betting and gaming violations more than doubled in FY26, making it the largest category of advertising violations in India. This was partly because the watchdog tied up with three gaming federations for additional vigilance. “The betting problem is not going to go away… operators are finding ways of circumventing restrictions and coming back in new avatars,” Kapoor said.
Srinivasan said part of the problem was jurisdictional gaps. Offshore operators, he said, face little meaningful exposure to Indian regulatory consequences, while the economics of digital advertising allow them to reappear and scale quickly after takedowns. ASCI data showed Meta accounted for nearly 80% of all violations, underscoring how platform structures shape enforcement outcomes.
The report also highlighted the coordinated nature of many betting campaigns. Offshore entities deploy simultaneous promotions across social media, streaming platforms and messaging apps, often using surrogate content tied to sports and entertainment pages to avoid detection.
Many influencers are ‘willful offenders’
Influencers have emerged as a key distribution channel for betting and gaming promotions. ASCI flagged 854 influencers for promoting offshore betting content in just nine months, with several accounts dedicated entirely to such promotions.
“These influencers are simply functioning as surrogate publishers for illegal operators. Until there is meaningful personal liability for influencers, I feel this channel will remain wide open,” Srinivasan said.
He added that ‘speed first, compliance later’ culture which the report describes is essentially rational behaviour given the current incentive structure: run the claim, generate sales, modify (only) when caught.