iWorld
Create campaigns to increase engagement and attract customers:Disney+ Hotstar’s EVP & CMO S Shakdher
Mumbai: In today’s world, creating the best marketing campaign means the company not only aims to attract consumers towards ads but engage them too, expressed Disney+ Hotstar executive VP and CMO Sidharth Shakdher. He was speaking at The Advertising Club’s third edition of D-CODE, held in Mumbai recently.
He discussed the effectiveness of funnel marketing for Disney+ Hotstar, which led to the conversion of 95 million engaged viewers from an overall spike of 140 million viewers. In 2019, the viewership increased to 112 million.
Shakdher further explained that in funnel marketing, a potential consumer goes from becoming aware of your brand to purchasing the goods or services.
“While building a funnel, two things were important to us: to have a better experience and to maximise the spike. We wanted to reverse the narrative that digital drives people,” he said. “We created this funnel as there was a spike happening and the challenge was to convert them into engaged consumers.”
“And every time a person got converted, they would negate, and then iterate the recommendations again and show him another set of recommendations so that he could convert from spiked to engaged,” he added.
Sidharth further advised that in all marketing campaigns, advertisers have to be able to pivot the right objectives, so, if they’re looking at a conversion-based campaign then it is requisite that advertisers have an action-based campaign in place.
“Your conversion could be a purchase, but your action could be an add to cart, reading a product retail page, or anything. Always know what works best for you in terms of conversion is concern,” he added further.
Mentioning about the creative ads on Disney+ Hotstar, he highlighted the local superheroes advertisements that have Indian middle-class power. The professional campaign titled “Superheroes” was published in India in October 2020. Disney + Hotstar had built the creative where “superheroes” were shown as common people, and they were using superpowers to stop their friends from going out and watching a match with them. An interesting campaign indeed!
He discussed further on ‘moment marketing’- a strategy for advertising that concentrates on reaching potential customers and where an advertiser takes advantage of ongoing events by delivering relevant and relatable content. Disney+ Hotstar reaped potential benefits matching it up during the IPL matches- an important cricket event. The broadcaster picked those moments on the controllable prioritisation matrix. The broadcaster prioritized its promotional technique based on trending things happening during the event and used social media to create connections and marketing opportunities.
Shakdher mentioned that Disney+ Hotstar has built a prioritisation matrix and established 15 rules, which led to the incorporation of 15,000 dynamic creatives. In order to produce effective results, dynamic creatives optimise a variety of ad components (such as pictures, videos, titles, descriptions, and CTAs).
There are instances, where a batsman is nearing a half-century of run, the other was a batsman’s strike rate went up above 150 percent , and there were two wickets falling in a row. In all the cases, ads used to appear automatically & matched with the situation when wickets were down, or batsmen were playing well & hitting sixes, which led consumers to click & engage with ads while watching matches.
“We were able to serve up in real-time while the match was going on,” claimed Sidharth. “That led to a 200 per cent improvement in cost per click (CPC), and we were able to reach 80 million viewers.”
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO), a real-time display advertising technology, was used by Disney+ Hotstar to personalise ads based on viewer information at the time of ad serving. Every time something similar occurs in a match, it appears on visual display, in static campaigns, performance marketing campaigns, or programmatic campaigns.
“Always have practical objectives for the campaign. If your message is that a particular product serves a particular need, then we also have sub-segments like pricing, convenience, etc., so run these smaller campaigns within the larger campaign and find out the segments that gave the best result,” he concluded.
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.
