The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has rolled out AdWise, a national consumer education programme for school children designed to build advertising literacy among students from Grades 3 to 8 across several Indian cities. Under ASCI Academy, the initiative has aimed to cover 1 million children in 2,000 schools by the end of 2026.
AdWise has already covered more than 1,14,000 students across seven states and 240 schools since its launch in September. The programme has been designed to equip children with critical thinking skills that help them identify, question and evaluate advertising messages in a digital-first environment.
ASCI Academy has tracked improvement in advertising literacy by measuring student awareness before and after classroom interventions. It has reported a marked improvement in students’ ability to recognise and differentiate advertising from content, along with better comprehension and engagement. Impact assessments have shown a 59%-86% rise in correct responses from Grades 3-5 and 57%-95% from Grades 6-8.
The initiative has addressed the growing need to enhance children’s awareness of subtle and immersive commercial messaging they encounter online and offline. ASCI has continued to focus on children as a key consumer group and has been working on an ethnographic report studying how Gen Alpha interprets and engages with advertising.
Following a successful pilot, the programme has been rolled out across Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Lucknow, Varanasi, Indore, Bhopal, Patna, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Kolkata, with SHARP as its execution partner. ASCI has planned to expand AdWise to Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Punjab, Assam and Karnataka in the next phase.
Interactive workshops for Grades 3-5 and 6-8 have been developed with age-appropriate content to help children decode persuasive techniques, identify different forms of advertising and make informed media choices. The initiative has included gamified tools, classroom material, handbooks, videos and parent guides. Digital resources have been made available in English, Hindi and Marathi, with Tamil and Kannada in progress.
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.”
