About The Standing Committee on Advertising (STACA)/ The Advertising Council of India (ACI)

STACA was established as a Trust with the Charity Commissioner, Bombay (now called Mumbai),  in 1981 and the founding trustees were: Harish Mahindra, Subhas Ghosal, Dr. Ram S. Tarneja, Eknath A Kshirsagar and P.V. Gadgil.  After sometime with the passing away of some trustees, the mantel fell on Anand Mahindra, Mike Khanna, Pradeep Guha, Goutam Rakshit. They then yielded to Colvyn Harris, Ramesh Narayan, Jaydeep Gandhi and Srinivasan K Swamy. The last three are the current Trustees of STACA.

The founding trustees deemed it fit to use the profit from the holding of the AdAsia 1982 to fulfil the objectives of the Trust, a vision that has been followed by the Trustees who came after them.

The principal activity of STACA was initially to oversee the running of the AdAsia conference whenever it was staged in India and to promote a robust Indian presence at this event when it was held overseas. Overtime, in order to make STACA the face of the industry, the Trustees thought it fit to start a division called Advertising Council of India (ACI) and this was to become the operating arm of STACA.

This operating arm – ACI – now has two members each drawn from all relevant industry bodies viz

1. Indian Society of Advertisers
2. Advertising Agencies Association of India
3. Indian Newspaper Society
4. Indian Broadcasting and Digital Foundation
5. The Advertising Club (Bombay)
6. Mobile Marketing Association and
7. The India Chapter of International Advertising Association

Representatives of above members form the Executive Committee of ACI and the Executive Committee has elected Ramesh Narayan as its Chairman.