Django "xxxxxx Object" display customization in admin action sidebar

The string you're seeing is coming from __unicode__ method, as others have mentioned. But the thing is that admin saves string representation of an object when it creates log event, therefore if you add __unicode__ implementation after the log entry was saved, you won't see new titles on old items, only after you make some new activity

__unicode__ does do that. Your model should look something like this:

class SomeModel(models.Model):
    def __unicode__(self):
       return 'Policy: ' + self.name

On Python 3 you need to use __str__:

def __str__(self):
   return 'Policy: ' + self.name

Using the __str__ method works on Python3 and Django1.8:

class MyModel(models.Model):

    name = models.CharField(max_length=60)

    def __str__(self):
        return 'MyModel: {}'.format(self.name)

The answers mentioning __str__ and __unicode__ methods are correct. As stated in the docs however, since version 1.6 (I think), you can use the python_2_unicode_compatible decorator for both Python 2 and Python 3:

from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.utils.encoding import python_2_unicode_compatible

@python_2_unicode_compatible
class MyClass(models.Model):
    def __str__(self):
        return "Instance of my class"

You can use the above in non-Model objects as well.