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Times Bridge and Girl Effect come together to empower young girls in India
MUMBAI: Times Bridge, the global investments and partnerships arm of The Times Group of India, today announced its strategic partnership with Girl Effect, an international non-profit organisation that works to empower adolescent girls to change their lives. The partnership will accelerate Girl Effect’s India focused plans.
Founded by the Nike Foundation in 2004, Girl Effect is now an independent organisation working from nine global locations and active in over 50 countries. Using a unique understanding of girls and innovative behaviour change science, Girl Effect has a globally-proven journey to create media brands that girls love, with content that is entertaining, informative and relevant to them.
In India, Girl Effect has a 15-member team of digital-media, brand and gender experts based in Mumbai focused on creating digital-first content that is co-created with and for girls. Working with partners to drive demand and link to information and services available, Girl Effect India’s branded media content is designed to debunk myths, challenge gender stereotypes and change behaviours so that girls are equipped with the right skills and confidence to make decisions about their future.
Through the partnership, Times Bridge will support Girl Effect India across the board – from market partnerships and the creation of an India Advisory Board to activating public advocacy initiatives and more – as it seeks to create a generation of girls who are able to define their own trailblazing journey and become a part of the India growth story. To date, Times Bridge has already initiated strategic alliances with national and regional influencers to advance awareness of Girl Effect’s work in India. Drawing on the resources of the Times Group, this partnership will also focus on bringing onboard culturally relevant distribution platforms and facilitating conversations with stakeholders – both public and private.
Commenting on the new association, Times Bridge CEO Rishi Jaitly said, “Times Bridge’s mission is to bring the world’s best ideas to India and share India’s best insights with the world. Girl Effect is a bold idea, and one that has proven itself by successfully launching compelling youth brands around the world. We at Times Bridge are honoured to bring to bear our resources to build on recent momentum and advance Girl Effect’s mission across India.”
Girl Effect CEO Jessica Posner Odede said, “We are delighted to have the support and confidence of Times Bridge as we launch in India. This partnership will accelerate our ability to scale and grow Girl Effect India, facilitating new partnerships that ultimately enable us to empower more girls to make positive choices. Girls in India face many barriers to reaching their potential – simply because they are girls – and negative norms, experienced in adolescence, will go on to impact a girl’s place in society for the rest of her life. With the digital revolution in India, there is now an unprecedented opportunity to use media and mobile at scale to empower girls to transform their lives. I’m grateful to Rishi and the team at Times Bridge for supporting us on this journey.”
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.
