iWorld
Amazon Prime puts fans at centerstage in latest brand campaign
Mumbai: Prime Video, India’s most loved entertainment destination, has unveiled a new marketing campaign that reinforces the brand’s position as the exclusive home for the most popular and talked about shows in the country today. Through a tongue-in-cheek film featuring Manoj Bajpayee, the campaign humorously underscores the incredible fandom that Prime Video’s shows and movies enjoy amongst Indian consumers. Spanning a diverse range of genres including romance, crime, suspense, comedy, horror, young adult and more, the film highlights a simple idea: All the shows and movies that everyone is talking about – you can watch exclusively on Prime Video.
The ad film opens with Manoj Bajpayee, also popularly known as Srikant Tiwari or The Family Man, asking for suggestions on what to watch. He is soon flooded with a barrage of recommendations. From his makeup artist endorsing Dahaad for its spine-tingling suspense to his gym trainer advocating for Made in Heaven, and even strangers suggesting popular Amazon Originals like The Boys, Farzi, and more, Manoj finds himself at the receiving end of must-watch recommendations, from everyone he encounters. An aha moment follows as he soon realizes what he already intuitively felt, that Prime Video is the home for content that everyone is watching and talking about!
Watch the ad film here:
“In our close to seven-year journey in India so far, we have had the amazing opportunity to spearhead a storytelling renaissance, offering captivating stories in multiple languages that resonate with people across the nation. We have been able to not only build a compelling slate of entertainment for our delightfully diverse customers, but have also brought cult shows like Mirzapur, The Family Man, Panchayat and so many more alive. Immersive stories, the kind that stay on everyone’s minds and become talked about, are what have solidified our position as everyone’s preferred entertainment service. 2023 has been an equally busy year at Prime Video, from the much-loved Farzi, Jubilee, Dahaad to a quirky Cinema Marte Dum Tak and gritty Bambai Meri Jaan, each show has found its core audience, and enjoyed enormous fandom. Who hasn’t been recommended a Prime Video show in a water cooler conversation at work, or a dinner with friends?” said Prime Video, India country director Sushant Sreeram. “This campaign originates from a simple consumer observation – there are so many shows of ours that fans and customers passionately recommend to their friends, family and sometimes even strangers! We wanted to celebrate that fandom. We take the opportunity to ignite such fandom very seriously and I am confident our future lineup of shows and movies will continue to inspire and entertain our customers.”
Manoj Bajpayee, who plays himself in the ad campaign said, “Streaming today has become an integral part of cultural conversations and our daily lives! Srikant Tiwari, has almost become an alter-ego for me – from being mobbed in airports in the smallest of Indian towns, to recognition at global forums, The Family Man has been loved by and talked about everywhere! This campaign effectively encapsulates this phenomenon with remarkable simplicity and relatability. It humorously conveys the message that every title on Prime Video is someone’s favorite show or movie. The passion fans have for shows and movies on Prime Video is truly special – I have witnessed this myself! And yes, I have a personal favorite too, no prizes for guessing which show though!”
The film will be supported by a 360-degree campaign on TV, digital, social media and outdoor along with social innovations that bring the premise of the film alive. Conceptualised by creative agency MANJA and the Prime Video team, the films have been scripted and produced by Breathless Films with director Vinil Mathew at the helm.
“When you watch a great show or movie, you can’t help but recommend it. You want everyone else to jump on the bandwagon. You want to be the one who spreads it like wildfire. Because shows and movies aren’t just content anymore. They are topics of conversation and influence culture. And since Prime Video has the most talked about shows of the year, we used that truth as our starting point. The only question left to answer was, who are they talking to? We went with the one man who probably needs no recommendations at all, The Family Man,” said MANJA executive creative director Suyash Barve.
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.
