ASCI Named Names: Honasa, L'Oréal and HUL Top India's Influencer Disclosure Violation List

For years, "disclosure lapses" in Indian influencer marketing were treated as a footnote — an #ad missing from a caption, a brand tag buried under fifteen other hashtags. The Advertising Standards Council of India's Annual Complaints Report for FY26 just turned that footnote into a scoreboard, and this time it comes with names attached.

The topline number is stark: ASCI processed 1,609 influencer advertisements over the year, and 97.3% of them required modification (BuzzInContent). That is not a rounding error or a handful of careless creators — it is very close to the entire sample. And unlike the last few years, disclosure was no longer the only problem. A full 54% of flagged influencer ads were tied to categories that are illegal or restricted to advertise at all, chiefly offshore betting and alcohol, with 869 influencers caught promoting products they should never have touched. Some accounts, ASCI noted, existed for no other purpose.

Which Brands Actually Got Named

What makes this year's report different from the usual industry hand-wringing is that ASCI broke the numbers down by advertiser, not just by category. In beauty and personal care, Honasa Consumer — Mamaearth's parent — led with 24 influencer ad cases requiring modification, followed by L'Oréal at 17 and Hindustan Unilever at 12 (Storyboard18). These are not fringe D2C upstarts figuring out compliance on the fly; they are the companies with the biggest legal and marketing budgets in the country.

Food and beverage told a similar story. Rebel Foods' Behrouz Biryani racked up 12 flagged influencer cases, Parag Milk Products had five, and ITC had four (Storyboard18). Across the personal care category alone, ASCI processed 639 cases, 90% of which needed correction, and 45% of those involved influencer-led advertising specifically — which tells you the category's biggest risk today isn't the TV ad, it's the Reel.

"This Is Not Ignorance Anymore"

The line from ASCI CEO Manisha Kapoor that will sting most brand teams is her read on intent. She said the industry can no longer treat disclosure failures as accidental, "especially among large brands and top-tier influencers," describing what she called a "tacit understanding sometimes between brands and influencers that let's go with it and see that we don't disclose." ASCI says it has also heard allegations that some advertisers financially incentivise influencers to skip disclosure tags altogether, and that a common trick is timing: post without the #ad label during the first hour or two when engagement peaks, then quietly add it — or pull it — later.

That distinction matters for anyone signing off on a campaign brief. A brand that gets caught once for a genuine oversight is a training gap. A brand named four years running for the same pattern is a strategy, and ASCI's report is written to make that visible to regulators, journalists and now, brand safety teams at holding companies.

Even the Biggest Creators Aren't Improving

If there was a hope that scale brings discipline, the report undercuts it. ASCI compared compliance among Forbes India's Top 100 Digital Stars and found the violation rate among these leading creators climbed to 76% in 2025, up from 69% in 2024. The influencers with the most to lose reputationally are, on this data, getting worse rather than better — which lines up with what we've written about the gap between reach and trust in Indian influencer marketing more broadly. Bigger following, it turns out, doesn't automatically buy better behavior.

Digital advertising overall bore the brunt of scrutiny too: 93% of the 9,841 ads ASCI reviewed for potential violations came from its own proactive monitoring rather than consumer complaints, and Meta platforms accounted for nearly 80% of digital violations flagged. The council's own read on the moment is a "speed-first, compliance-later" culture, where posting fast and fixing later has become an accepted cost of doing business rather than an exception.

What This Means If You're Signing the Cheques

For brand and marketing teams, the takeaway isn't abstract. If Honasa, L'Oréal, HUL, ITC and Rebel Foods — companies with in-house legal review and agency oversight — are appearing on this list, an informal "the influencer will handle disclosure" clause in your contract is not a real safeguard. It's worth revisiting how campaigns get briefed and signed off in light of ASCI's 2026 disclosure rules, and building in a simple check before a post goes live: is the #ad tag visible without a click, present in the first frame of video, and there from minute one rather than added an hour later?

The creators and brands treating disclosure as a legal-minimum checkbox are the ones now showing up by name in a public report. The ones treating it as part of the deal — visible, timely, unambiguous — are the ones who'll still be trusted the next time a regulator, or a customer, goes looking.