The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has rolled out AdWise, a national consumer education programme for school children launched in September, that is set to improve advertising literacy amongst children from Grades 3 to 8 across several cities in India over 15 to 18 months.
Following a successful pilot phase, AdWise is being rolled out across Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Lucknow, Varanasi, Indore, Bhopal, Patna, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Kolkata. The NGO School Health Annual Report Programme (SHARP) is ASCI’s execution partner. Building on Phase 1, ASCI plans to expand AdWise to additional states in Phase 2 – Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Punjab, Assam and Karnataka – while deepening penetration in existing markets.
Under the aegis of ASCI Academy, the programme aims to cover 1 million students in 2,000 schools across India via classroom sessions by the end of 2026. It has already covered more than 1,14,000 students across seven states and 240 schools. It is designed to equip school children with the critical thinking skills needed to identify, question and evaluate advertising messages in an increasingly digital world.
ASCI Academy tracks improvement in advertising literacy by measuring the increase in the percentage of students recognising and comprehending ads, differentiating ads from content, and engagement metrics and feedback quality of students, teachers and parents. The students were assessed before and after the sessions to understand the programme’s impact. The program shows significant impact with a 59%-86% increase in students correctly answering questions around advertising literacy in the case of Grades 3-5 and a 57%-95% for grades 6-8.
With the tagline ‘Smart Kids. Smart Choices’, AdWise addresses a crucial gap in digital literacy education. While today’s children are digital natives, they often lack the critical awareness needed to navigate the seamless, subtle and immersive advertising that permeates their online and offline worlds. The programme aims to reduce their vulnerability to misleading and potentially harmful advertisements.
Children, an important audience for advertisers, are a key focus area for ASCI. It is currently working on an ethnographic report that examines the relationship that children aged 7 to 15 (Gen Alpha) have with media and advertising , including how they identify, classify and interpret commercial messaging. Manisha Kapoor, CEO and Secretary General of ASCI, said: “Children today are exposed to advertising in ways that are fundamentally different from previous generations. They don’t possess critical cognitive abilities to navigate advertising, but they are increasingly being exposed online and in the real world to marketing messages in various forms. With children being an important focus of ASCI, we are equipping them, parents and teachers to critically analyse and understand advertising’s influence. Enabling children this way fosters responsible media consumption and creates an informed audience.”
