iWorld
GUEST COLUMN: Mobile marketing in the OTT landscape: Big opportunity for digital marketers
Mumbai: The rise in both viewership and engagement of over-the-top (OTT) has opened up a world of possibilities for marketers looking for new and better ways to reach their consumers sitting in the comfort of their homes. Recent reports estimate that the OTT segment will grow to approximately $ four billion by 2025.
Confirming this trend, India saw a huge upsurge in media consumption between March and June 2020. By the end of 2020, OTT video subscribers almost tripled to nearly 62 million, up from 32 million at the end of 2019. This accelerated growth of the Indian SVOD industry is assumed to be caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite the fact that the OTT streaming business is dominated by large corporations such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Amazon Prime, smaller OTT streaming services continue to emerge. In order to have an edge over these budding competitors, it’s essential to utilise the power and proven results of mobile marketing.
Before we dive into the strategies, below are some major trends that mobile marketers must be cognisant of, to make the best use of this ripe opportunity:
Mobile is becoming the first choice for content: Mobile has surpassed traditional TV as the main growth route for video distribution. In fact, mobile collaborations now account for more than half of all recent OTT video bundle deals, indicating that customers are increasingly using mobile devices. As more MNOs subsidise at no additional cost to encourage upsell and retention, this trend is anticipated to continue.
The rise of 5G: Because 5G internet is projected to become the standard, especially in metropolitan areas, it will permanently transform streaming patterns.
Shared viewing due to lockdown: The entire population has been forced to stay at home owing to worldwide lockdowns, which has resulted in a fast rise in the consumption of content. Many OTT platforms, such as Netflix and Disney+, quickly acted on this and launched technology that allows individuals to view films together on a video chat, allowing platform users to stream in sync, to assist customers to isolate themselves and social distance. GroupWatch on Disney+ and Teleparty on Netflix have been huge hits, and it’s a trend that is likely to remain.
Shift in OTT Model: Live and linear OTT services, which are projected to be an essential element of the future generation of OTT video, have a large growth opportunity based on existing watching trends and untapped video segments. Pay-TV providers are ideally positioned to offer live streaming services that make use of content that is best enjoyed in real-time, such as news, weather, talk programs, and sports. In the future, the content will be re-bundled under an OTT structure, whereas the previous cable model concentrated on content unbundling.
Now, in OTT, when it comes to developing a short- or long-term marketing strategy, mobile marketing is a critical component. There’s a mobile marketing channel for every segment of your audience where they are most comfortable, from email to pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing.
To be effective with mobile marketing, marketers must provide a consistent experience that customers expect—which may be difficult to do when you’re trying to attract, engage, and retain people across several platforms.
Following are some of the key things that marketers must keep in mind while crafting strategies for the OTT landscape-
Push notifications are key: User-behavior-driven push notifications should remain a crucial component of the entire engagement plan, which are proven to boost engagement rates by as much as 80 per cent.
Value recommendations of customers: It’s extremely important for marketers to understand the preference of their customers and value their suggestions. Viewing history, in-app behavior, and daily time of app launch are some of the data points that when accumulated continuously will give a wealth of information on customer behavior, significantly helping personalisation. This personalisation will further help in increasing in-app time spent by generating the most appropriate content recommendations over time.
Timing is crucial: Focusing on personalisation and context is very important to make mobile marketing work for OTT platforms. However, what’s also important is delivering the content, suggestions, and notifications at the correct time, the results of which are proven to be phenomenal.
Conversion of freemium subscribers to paying customers is imperative: Acquiring users is definitely important when it comes to implementing a growth strategy, but the end goal should be to turn the subscribers who are consuming content for free into paying customers. Hence, marketers need to focus on pitching the platform’s subscription options, with appropriate personalisation, to the customer.
Make the customers feel important: Finally, building brand loyalty is the key at every stage, and this can be done by making customers feel valued by addressing their feedback. Hence, through personalised and crafted push notifications and in-app messages, repeat users can be encouraged to rate and review the OTT platform.
Connecting the links between online and offline media is the future of mobile marketing. When used with other, more traditional media, mobile is a strong tool that should be viewed as the glue that holds everything together. The competitive environment for OTT apps, both native and browser-based, is continuously shifting. Benchmarking one’s performance and development versus industry norms is essential for marketers.
OTT marketers need to note that distinctions between the provision of and accessibility to high-quality content across OTT platforms will continue to merge. How they can achieve a substantial competitive edge is by using data-driven AI-powered customised, relevant, and time-bound multi-channel dialogues with consumers. For successful user engagement for your media, marketers must take advantage of every single mobile moment!
(Dave Dabbah is former chief marketing officer of CleverTap. The views expressed in the column are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)
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.
