Mumbai: Broadcasters have bent under advertisers’ pressure, and rolled back their former decision of charging up 25% surcharge on all subsisting ad transactions.

The Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF) has declared that the surcharge will not be enforced immediately, and will not have an effect on surviving deals.

A declaration from the foundation stated, “We have no desire to jeopardize or sabotage the marketing plans of the advertiser community, and have decided to unanimously advise all members to roll back the application of the 25% surcharge on existing deals.”

“IBF is shortly calling an extraordinary general meeting to evolve a consensus approach to address the issue of fair value for advertising inventory for advertising inventory,” the statement added.

The related sources said that this would be after Diwali.

After the IBF’s statement early last week, lots of advertisers have decided to take on the IBF and decline to agree to the new rates. In the meantime, the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) are also gathering on Wednesday to sketch out their action plans.

The IBF sources said that the broadcasters did not wish to threaten their old kinships with the advertisers or enter any lawful hassles.

IBF associates who attended the conference on Wednesday comprised Jawahar Goel of ZEE , Sony’s Rohit Gupta, Uday Shankar of Star, Raj Nayak of NDTV, B Saikumar (TV 18), and also spokespersons from Sahara, Times Broadcast and National Geographic Channel, among many others.

Another rationale behind IBF's move was the festive season during which a black out could seriously affect the marketing strategies of the advertisers. “Amost all the advertisements were blacked out yesterday and only BBC and Disney carried any ads as they were not willing to jeopardize their internatinal relationships,” the source added.

On IBF’s former decision on increasing advertisement costs, a representative stated, “Channels and networks of every size and stripe have communicated their frustration with the unfairly low pricing imposed on their advertising inventory as a result of the indifferent attitude of and monopolistic consolidation tendencies among AAAI member agencies.”

Star India COO Uday Shankar added, “While we are sure that we will go ahead with the decision to levy this surcharge, we are just bringing in a correction in the manner in which we execute this, and hence we have decided to honour existing contracts.”