The new trend of pro-woman, counterstereotype advertisements termed ‘femvertising’ is gaining popularity and social acceptance. Social cognitive theory postulates that children learn from social experiences including those from media by identifying with other individuals, observing such models, processing their behaviour and later imitating such behaviour most often in a way considered gender-appropriate by society. We conducted an experiment in India, a collectivist society with a strong patriarchal culture, to test the effects of advertisements on the self-esteem of adolescent boys and girls and to examine the impact of media strategies applied in the classroom and aimed at stereotype reduction. In the study, adolescent boys and girls were randomly treated with stereotypical, neutral or femvertising ads. A three-way mixed ANOVA identified a significant effect of treatment and time in the femvertising group. The study demonstrates the efficacy of femvertising ads depicting women empowerment and counterstereotype imagery as classroom aids, as part of media strategies to minimize the effects of gender bias at homes and communities, and to enhance gender sensitization. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd