The Unstereotype Alliance, collaborating with 240 member organisations globally, has been

committed to eliminating harmful stereotypes from advertising since 2017. They have made notable

strides in how women and girls are portrayed, but the representation of men and masculinity

has largely stagnated or regressed over the past 75 years based on Getty Images research.

Stereotypes of men in advertising haven't changed in 75 years, but the media they are consuming is unrecognisable. Gen Z men in particular have learnt to avoid traditional advertising at all costs, with linear reach dropping and 63% of this audience using ad blockers.

We therefore needed to change the game and level-up their new media worlds with a modernised portrayal of masculinity.

Gaming is Gen Z men's biggest and fastest growing shaper of culture, but the games they are playing do not reflect the vision of masculinity they want to see in the world.

With the biggest game launch in history on the horizon, GTA VI, we set out to work with the developers to provide a broader view of what success and masculinity looked like in a game which traditionally favours more old school attitudes.

To do this, we tapped into gamers love for a side-quest, and brought back previous male characters from the past games for an epic quest, where our audience would engage with and reconsider multiple different versions of masculine success along the way.

The target audience for this campaign was Gen Z male gamers, as we identified this group to be the most in need of seeing our broader view on masculinity. Our strategy was to revive famous faces from past GTA side quests, with an updated view on masculinity & success.

We did this through the platform of Side quest: Re-Loaded - Changing the game (literally), partnering with Grand Theft Auto VI to bring back the game’s most influential and iconic men, expanding and re-defining what it means to be successful in-game.

Working with Rockstar, we brought back Ricky Gervais, Dr Dre and Jason Sudeikis’ characters for one epic side-quest, where our audience would help Jason get Ricky and Dre to appear on his podcast and discuss their view on what it means to be succesful (but there will be complicaitons on the way!)

Once the quests were loaded into the game, we jumped on launch day hype, partnering with the world’s biggest Twitch streamers who created content around their side quest missions, putting our iconic characters at the centre of gaming and cultural conversation.

Next, we infultrated conversation at its source, creating social media avatars for each of our three characters, and sharing their progressive view on male success both in-game and IRL.

Across Reddit & Discord, target keywords in comments which suggest the users may need some help broadening their in-game aspirations.

The campaign ran in three phases, with the quests being loaded from launch day, our streamers ensuring we had presence early on and out charecters carrying on the conversation long past the end date.

Regarding scale, our campaign piggybacks on the biggest cultural moment of 2026, and lives on indefinatley along wit the game and its 100m+ annual players.