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ASCI joins UN Women’s gender programme Unstereotype Alliance
MUMBAI: Advertising industry watchdog Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) on Monday announced that it has become a founding ally of the UN Women’s gender-based programme called Unstereotype Alliance. UN Women is a United Nations entity for gender equality and women's empowerment.
"After announcing a nationwide GenderNext study, ASCI is pleased to announce that we are now a founding ally of the UN women’s programme, the UNstereotype Alliance," ASCI said in a tweet.
ASCI now becomes a founding ally of the @unwomenindia @un_stereotype
to further its Gender agenda. This comes days after ASCI announced it's #GenderNext study.@kapoor_manisha @Subkam https://t.co/Y2776fLVVk https://t.co/FoGnE5ga4M— ASCI (@ascionline) March 29, 2021
A thought and action platform, Unstereotype Alliance aims to remove negative stereotypes around women in the media and advertising content. The programme unites industry leaders, decision-makers and creatives globally to end harmful gender-based stereotyping in advertising. The alliance contributes to empowering women in all their diversity (race, class, age, ability, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, language, education, etc.) and addressing harmful masculinities to help create a gender equal world. The launch of the India chapter of the programme is scheduled for 30 March.
ASCI has shifted its focus to gender portrayal after recently preparing guidelines on influencer marketing, online gaming and covid-related advertising in India. Just last week, the ad industry regulator had, in association with Futurebrands, launched its first ever deep, immersive dive into gender depiction in Indian advertising. The study titled ‘GenderNext’ aims to provide actionable insights that can shape the gender narratives in advertising positively, ASCI said. The study is the first of several initiatives ASCI aims to undertake in 2021 as part of a year-long focus on gender, the regulator said.
The report, which is set to be released in September, will study more than 200 national and regional advertisements published in the past few years. ASCI said it plans to expand its existing advertising code using the study findings. To unravel gender narratives in advertising, to evolve and enrich gender understanding in the context of cultural change and to provide insights to navigate and embrace positive narratives for women in advertising content were listed as some of the main objectives behind the exercise. With this new found alliance, the advertising regulator hopes to further expand its gender agenda.
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
