iWorld
Star Sports’ ‘Mauka’ rides high on Twitter Brand index
MUMBAI: Team India is on a demolition mode eliminating every rival that has stood against the ‘Men in Blue.’ This excitement around the matches has also translated on social media platforms, where fans have displayed their excitement.
Sensing an opportunity here, various brands have been launching innovative campaigns. In week four now, micro blogging site Twitter has released its brand index. This week saw one new debutant with contests by some of the big movers. Meanwhile Star Sports India continues to ride high on the ‘Mauka Mauka’ campaign. Interestingly, this week saw as much conversation during non-India match days as during India game days, which meant there was almost constant conversation on the platform.
Below are the top five tweets and the brand journey on Twitter during the week as well as the actual index.
1) Star Sports India’s #MaukaMauka campaign entered its fourth week. Like previous weeks, there was the lead up video for the upcoming game as well as a follow up revealed at the end of the game. This time around Star Sports asked users to Tweet to them with the hash tag #MaukaMauka to reveal the ad on Twitter before it got revealed on TV. The ad itself was on how an Indian win could help Pakistan progress to the last eight. They also continued to provide commentary on the games itself, which ensured that people kept engaging with them through the week too. @StarSportsIndia
2) Alto 800 went down the contest route and managed to debut at number two. Trying to build equity as a potential first car for its target audience they ran smart contests around hash tags like #DebutTips and #AltoFirstTimer. Both were aimed at getting people to engage with them to get tips for first time buyers as well as connect with potential clients. There were prizes up for grabs and that continued to create impact among users. @Alto_800:
3) HDFC Life continued to engage users around its hash tag #MyTeamMyPride. This week they asked people to predict outcomes, scores and other details of the game to win prizes up for grabs. The hash tag has found a way of rallying fans as well as giving a boost to their campaign. @HDFCLIFE
4) Dairy Milk India was also able to find a great balance between running a contest and exciting cricket fans around their #FansofJoy hash tag as well. For the contest, they asked people questions about the game to test cricket knowledge of their followers. Apart from this #FansOfJoy moments were also prominently shared across national dailies. @DairyMilkIn
5) Castrol Cricket followed what now seems like a winning mode – a meaningful hash tag, a contest and good content – to make Castrol the latest addition to the Twitter Brand Index. They entered with the hash tag – #ClingOnToTheCup. The big idea this week was that they asked people to Tweet to them with their pictures and they would put those pictures up on the boundaries display boards during the Cricket World Cup games. People really got behind the idea, which is essentially another way of becoming a part of the live cricket experience. @CastrolCricket 
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
