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Political advertising in India – social media and the first-time voter
If you’ve always wondered why and what’s the point of political advertising when the candidates get enough coverage around their sheninagans on a regular basis, then read on.
The primary purpose of political advertising is to swing the perception of people who have ‘CONFUSION’ written all over their faces in capital letters, and ultimately, to win votes. Because for a larger percentage of the politicians, it’s all about obtaining and retaining power, fuelled by money and greed.
Past demeanours do not count, and most political parties have cracked the seven deadly sins of Indian voters. To elaborate, here goes:
1. The Indian public has extremely short-term memory
2. Over time we learn to tolerate anything
3. Nothing comes above religion and caste
4. Political ignorance, even amongst the educated
5. Petty appeasement through freebies
6. Indians love to hate each other
7. Need to hero worship and follow dynasties
Courtesy: Ishaan Mohan Bagga, Editor, Indian Exponent. http://indianexponent.com/24298/7-weaknesses-of-indian-voter.html
The economics of 2014 elections
Having mentioned money, Reuters reports that ‘Indian politicians are expected to spend around US $5 billion (Rs 30,000 crores) on campaigning for elections next month (April 2014) – a sum second only to the most expensive US presidential campaign of all time – in a splurge that could give India’s floundering economy a temporary boost.
India’s campaign spend, which can include cash stuffed in envelopes as well as multi-million-dollar ad campaigns, has been estimated at Rs 300 billion (US $4.9 billion) by the Centre for Media Studies, which tracks spending.
That is triple the expenditure the Centre said was spent on electioneering in the last national poll in 2009.’
Media is the largest beneficiary in the arsenal; and all related advertising, turns into a medium to deliver promises, attack and counter-attack opponents, and function as the political game changer. Swirling on a delicate ideological spindle – ‘A lie told often enough becomes the truth’ – Vladimir Lenin. Also successfully used by Hitler’s Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who also served as chancellor for a day, following Hitler’s death.
So couple greed with the seven deadly sins of Indian voters, stir in tonnes of cash and engage some of India’s leading advertising-PR-social media conglomerates to churn out propaganda and you have a volcanic blitz of media madness; where even educated, otherwise analytical minds can’t distinguish between hell or high water.
The year 2014 is a very interesting year for India as the majority of the audience that will be voting this year will be very young. At a news conference in New Delhi, the election commission said that the process of voting in the sixteenth Lok Sabha will see the largest ever population of eligible voters, led by over 814 million voters, 100 million more than in 2009. This time round, more than 23 million voters are aged between 18 and 19. For the first time in a general election in India, voters will be allowed to cast a ballot for “None of the Above.”
To the extent that the ultimate decision might also be in the hands of India’s youth because of the existing majority, the marketer has set up shop in the marketplace, i.e., political advertisers have looked into reaching out to the audience where they currently ‘hang out’.
With advertising and communication being churned out faster than widgets, there is no thinking time for the creators; hence they all narrate versions of the same story, with a different overtones, over different platforms.
The story goes something like this –
Cause
Here’s the starting point: what does the party stand for? Why does this party exist? What does the prime minister candidate stand for? There are many causes on offer: secular, development, safety, jobs, prices, pride, honesty and governance.
The first-time voter is young, idealistic and seeks a motivating argument to come and vote. The best argument to this group is economic: the promise of jobs and a brighter future.
Constituency
Similar to brand marketing campaigns, the candidate who presents the best chance in the constituency is a combination of optimising many variables and micro-targeting, i.e., “Think national but choose local” being one of the most commonly used engagement strategies right now.
Comparison
By creating syndromes of fear, uncertainty and doubt amongst the people, political advertising portrays competitors in an unfavourable manner, thereby benefitting the attacking candidate and not marring his image; eventually leading to winning more votes.
Celebrities
Everyone from TV presenters, to actors, to former diplomats and government servants, will start offering their endorsements for the benefit of the voter. Such endorsements will multiply gradually in this election. Parties will rope in influential social commentators and feed them with talking points to build preference, especially among undecided voters.
This election is therefore truly at the mercy of first-time voters and social media targeting, which will decide its outcome; since reliable stats reveal that over than half of the total youth audiences are on social websites.
According to a research by Autumn worldwide, ‘out of a million conversations on social media on elections in September 2013, first-time voters (overall 150 million) led 40 per cent of chats. They discussed the rupee, prices, women’s safety, governance and jobs. Their idea of accountability in politics will define India over the next 20 years’. So 2014 is the start…
What’s important here is not which party wins the elections this time, but the power of crowd-sourcing and influencing opinion on the Indian social scene. This of course calls for a social and cultural mindset change, which is slowly experiencing what theologians call an ‘eschatological breaking in’, or a foretaste of things to come before they actually occur.
Talk about bringing colour to Indian politics. While the political camps pore over rivals’ speeches looking for historical inaccuracies and discrepancies in political manifestos, a parallel analysis is unfolding across homes, public and individual spaces alike.
Politics and the youth in India have never seemed to have had a liking for each other so far, the relationship between the two being pre-dominantly passive. But of late, with candidates like Meera Sanyal being active on social networks and using their personal pages to promote their ‘brand’ and reach out to the users by actually informing them about what they intend to do or what they are currently doing at the moment which helps them create a following amongst the dominant and previously dormant majority.
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This adoption of new media by Indian politicians, even though late provides a personal connect between the aspiring leaders and the junta making the game a little more complicated than it previously was keeping the users aware about the actual story instead of depending on paid media for biased information.
There is another side to the story as well. Where there’s any form of advertising there are advertising agencies and this time they come with all guns blazing on the digital front too!
The best example for this would be Narendra Modi who has managed to carve up a decent spot for himself in the cyberspace by making complete use of social networks along with the help of his agency by keeping the audience informed about his actions as well as sharing his opinions over different issues. Mr. Modi’s social pages also boast of web applications which look towards gathering volunteers for various causes as well as send festive audio greetings to his fans on the web.
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A bit too much you said? You be the judge, but you cannot undermine the fact that these are the reasons why the 2014 elections are so exciting.
The future of the country is yet to be determined but advertising expenditure is enabling emulation of the likes of Lenin and Goebbels…
Long live the Indian (r)evolution and heil to its leaders.
Hello, anybody (with a conscience) home?
(These are purely personal views of Raising iBrows digital and engagement strategist Carl Noronha and indiantelevision.com does not subscribe to these views)
MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.
If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.
What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.
At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.
When OTT finally understood the time problem
For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”
That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.
What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.
Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:
* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing
* Completion rates continued to slide
* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer
At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.
Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.
Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.
There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.
By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.
This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.
In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.
Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.
Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift
ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.
From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.
What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:
* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle
While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.
Why audiences started responding differently
One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.
What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.
On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.
A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:
* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day
This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.
Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.
2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality
The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.
Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:
* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?
This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.
Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.
Failures Became Visible Faster
2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.
Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.
Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.
Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.
The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.
OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit
Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.
OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.
Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.
That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.
What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry
By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:
* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego
Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.
Looking Ahead
Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.
Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.
Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.
2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
