Dismantling Stereotypes One Media Plan at a Time

This International Women’s Day UN Women calls for action to dismantle the structural barriers to equal justice: discriminatory laws, weak legal protections, and harmful practices and social norms that erode the rights of women and girls. 

When stereotypes go unchallenged, they don't just linger on screens – they shape attitudes, restrict opportunities, and deny women and girls the rights and justice they deserve.

Advertising and media play a critical role in shaping culture and making online spaces safer for women and girls. Portrayals, narratives, and representations in advertising can actively mould attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours.

Stereotypes don't just appear on billboards or news feeds. They live in the decisions made long before a single image is produced. A new initiative from the UK Chapter of the Unstereotype Alliance, convened by UN Women, is determined to change that.

Launched in early 2026, the Community Media Partner Lab is a co-mentoring programme that brings senior brand and agency leaders together with the founders and editors of established community media platforms. 

We spoke to UN Women UK’s Melda Simon about how this initiative came about.

The Lab brings together some exciting voices from both sides of the industry, what made this the right moment to pull together something like this? 

There’s been a growing recognition that inclusive advertising isn’t just about what brands say, it’s also about where they show up. Right now, we’re seeing a clear gap between intent and execution. Brands want to build trust and cultural relevance, but the systems and habits of media planning haven’t fully caught up. At the same time, community media platforms have built deep trust, cultural fluency and highly engaged audiences, but they remain structurally underrepresented in mainstream media plans. This felt like the right moment to bring those two worlds together in a more intentional, reciprocal way. The co-mentoring approach creates space for real and actoinable exchange and will hopefully unlock new models of partnership that are both more inclusive and more effective. 

Beyond the six-month programme, how do you hope this changes the way media planning gets done day to day across the industry?

For me, the real ambition is to shift inclusive media from being something that relies on individual passion into something that’s built into the system. Today, a lot of inclusive planning still happens because one person pushes for it. What we’re trying to do through the Community Media Partner Lab and other initiatives is normalise it so that community media are considered from the outset, not as a bolt-on. That means changing both mindset and infrastructure. On one hand, it’s about building planners’ confidence and cultural intelligence so they can make better, more informed decisions day to day. On the other, it’s about making it easier to act through things like the open sourced Community Media Directory and practical tools that bring visibility to platforms that have historically been overlooked. Essentially, we want to see more diverse media plans, more equitable investment, and ultimately a planning approach that better reflects the real world and delivers stronger results because of it! 

For those who rarely see themselves authentically represented in advertising, what difference could a shift in where brands choose to show up make to their lives? 

Where brands show up sends a powerful signal about who they value and who they see. When investment flows into trusted community platforms, it doesn’t just improve representation it leads to more nuanced storytelling, greater visibility, and ultimately a stronger sense of belonging for people who have historically been overlooked. But this isn’t just a social good, t’s a commercial opportunity. As ISBA and others have highlighted, more inclusive and diverse media plans are linked to stronger campaign effectiveness, because they tap into audiences with higher levels of trust, engagement and cultural relevance. So the shift isn’t simply from exclusion to inclusion - it’s from low-attention, low-trust environments to ones where brands can genuinely connect and resonate. And that has a dual impact: it changes how people see themselves in the world, and it drives better outcomes for brands at the same time.

The publications represented – such as Amaliah, Black Ballad, DIVA and Gay Times – are platforms with fiercely loyal audiences, built on genuine trust. Yet they're routinely skipped over in media planning, not because their audiences don't spend money, but because the industry isn’t built with them in mind.

Inclusive advertising isn't just about what you say. It's about where you choose to show up.

For Roxy Bourdillon, Editor-in-Chief of DIVA, the stakes are personal as well as professional. As a lesbian, she says she "rarely sees myself authentically represented in advertising," which is exactly why getting this right matters beyond the business case.

That structural oversight has real consequences. When women, queer people, Black communities and Muslim audiences don't see themselves in advertising, or only see themselves in tokenistic ways, or at certain times of the year, it quietly reinforces the idea that they're peripheral. And that feeds directly into the social norms and stereotypes that the Unstereotype Alliance exists to eradicate.

The Lab is not a one-way masterclass in "how media planning works." It is reciprocal. Community media leaders bring something brands genuinely struggle to manufacture on their own: deep cultural knowledge and the kind of audience trust that takes years to earn.

As Nafisa Bakkar, CEO of Amaliah, puts it: "Inclusive media buys often rely on one passionate individual within a company." That is a fragile way to make progress. And it's one of the behaviors that the Lab is trying to change, by helping embed inclusive media planning in company practice.

This initiative is part of a broader set of tools that includes a practical planning framework (the 3Bs Playbook), an open-source directory of community media platforms being built with ISBA, and in person events connecting brands with media owners directly.

When brands consistently show up in spaces that communities already trust, the cumulative effect goes beyond reach and ROI. It shifts what feels normal. It changes who gets to see themselves as someone worth speaking to.

And for women and girls, especially those at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, the shift in what's considered normal is exactly what justice looks like in practice.