iWorld
Influencer ethics and transparency: A look at industry standards and best practices
Mumbai: There is no doubt that the trend of Influencer Marketing has skyrocketed, with social media feeds bombarded with influencer and business collaborations. While this concept is certainly not a new one, over the recent years, the immense popularity of this new age community termed ‘Influencers’ has been a game changer in the marketing landscape. This dynamic industry which was previously valued at $16.4 billion, continues to grow further with a whopping revenue forecast of $143.10 billion in 2030.
Emerging as the most preferred business strategy to do both- forge ephemeral connections with customers and boost sales, Influencer Marketing has left no stone unturned. Nevertheless, it’s pivotal to delve into the ascent of it, since this gigantic community is responsibly becoming the direct communication between brands and audience. Thus, a comprehensive system that has specific guidelines and ethical practices for both influencers and businesses, can go a long way in fostering a transparent community.
Choosing the Right Brands
Influencer-Brand partnerships from the onset itself, need to go beyond the realms of monetary considerations. Diligent efforts need to be made by both brands and influencers to cultivate a relationship that prioritises positive collaborations and respectful communication, in order to showcase the audiences an absolute genuinity and authenticity. Chasing money can never bring any good, which is why Influencers need to meticulously select and partner only with brands that share similar values, since their community relies on their words and recommendations before making purchases.
Open Communication from Both Ends
Influencer Marketing clutches onto the trust between brands, influencers and their followers. In order to preserve and cultivate this trust, it’s essential for them to establish a transparent and open communication channel that clearly outlines the expectations and objectives of both parties. Transparency is an indispensable asset when it comes to fostering relationships between brands and influencers, as it is the lifeforce sustaining trust and credibility as well as instrumental in averting customer confusion and misinterpretations.
Learning where to Stop
It’s no secret that there is a limit to everything in life and going beyond that boundary only brings forth repercussions and complexities, which is applicable even for Influencer Marketing. The world of Influencer marketing is characterised by the bond that influencers share with the audience, which is why it’s crucial for Influencers to remember that their popularity is solely based on the support and love of their audience, which they have achieved by being authentic and real. Thus, it’s vital for Influencers to set limits in Influencer-Brand collaborations and never traverse through that murky boundary.
Relatable Integration Instead of Ads
The key element that has made Influencer marketing a reliable source of information over traditional advertising is its seamless ability to integrate within the content, making it all the more relevant and manifold its impact. Instead of just running after quantity over quality, Influencers need to advocate for genuine integration of products or services into the content, showcasing to the audience that it is more than merely promotional advertising. For instance, Dunkin Donuts collaboration with Charlie Damelio has been a superhit because long before Charlie’s fame, she had always advocated Dunkin, making the recent partnership more relatable and genuine.
Educating the Audience
Influencers possess the ability to sway the purchasing decisions of their followers, generating noteworthy traffic and sales for the brand. However, as an Influencer it is your ethical responsibility to not misuse the trust and power that your audience has bestowed you with, instead, be real and educate your audience about the why, basically why they should invest in a particular product or service. Influencer Marketing isn’t merely about promoting products, but in reality, it’s also about delivering valuable information through content that is informative.
Being Responsible and Owning up
Beyond fostering aspirational lifestyles, it is significant for Influencers to discuss the accountability of the content that they have shared. In certain cases, some endorsements can raise audience distrust and scepticism, which is why it’s crucial for Influencers to mitigate such concerns and ambiguity by clearly stating the nature of such endorsements. Given that more than half of the world’s population religiously follows Influencer recommendations, it is the moral responsibility of Influencers to take accountability for their mistakes and address any issues or controversies.
Final Thoughts
There is an absolute certainty that Influencer Marketing needs to be marked and shaped by ethical and transparent practices to cultivate an authentic relationship between brands and Influencers. With a strong grasp on the foundation of their journey, Influencers need to prioritise choosing the right brands, creating open communication channels, crafting content that is educational as well as peppered with sparks of creativity and most importantly imposing restrictions with something that doesn’t align with their individuality.
The author of this article is by Dot Media CEO & co-founder Shubham Singhal.
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.
