iWorld
TikTok tops ad equity charts for second year: Kantar
Mumbai: Data, insights and consulting company Kantar on Thursday released its report titled Media Reactions 2021, the second edition of Kantar’s global ad equity ranking of media channels and media brands. Ad equity refers to the attitudes consumers have towards the advertising experience within specific platforms and ad formats.
Across branded digital platforms, TikTok remains top of the global ad equity rankings. Although leading the highest spot as overall platform in only one market – Taiwan, TikTok is the leading global digital platform in the important US market and is first or second-ranked of the global digital platforms in 9 of the 22 markets where it was measured.
The inclusion of commerce platforms in this year’s ranking illustrates their increasing importance across the digital advertising landscape. Amazon ranks second globally among consumers, topping the list in 4 markets. Together with regional e-commerce giant Mercado Libre, which leads in Argentina, Amazon’s success showcases why e-commerce has entered the online media channel ad equity rankings in third place.
Despite the prominence of digital platforms in daily life, consumers continue to be more positive about offline ad platforms such as cinema, sponsored events, magazine ads, and point of sale (POS). The popularity of podcast adverts has risen. Positioned at #11 in the overall ad equity ranking, they have overtaken influencer content as the preferred digital ad medium. Podcast ads are perceived as both better quality and more relevant compared to 2020, but also more repetitive, unsurprising given the increase in ad spend on the platform.
Global vs Local: The report highlights the importance and challenge of market-specific media strategies. In 16 of the 23 markets surveyed the top-ranked media brand was a local media brand or a localised version of global media brands. The 10 of these 16 are news and magazine brands. This local success, together with differing attitudes to the ads on global digital media brands, makes balancing the benefits of scale of global media platforms with the promise of greater relevance from local media gems ever more important.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: The report also underlines the challenge for brands in keeping their media mix reflective of the latest consumer media preferences as well as reflective of their own values and brand positioning. Marketers favour channels and platforms they believe provide both trustworthy and innovative advertising environments. Among the global brands, Instagram best manages this balancing act. YouTube, Google and Facebook are trusted platforms but are considered slightly less innovative.
TikTok is not yet trusted by marketers as much as the more established platforms, but it has made enormous improvements in the past year. It remains comfortably the most innovative place for ads, and trust has doubled, so many more marketers are now positive about placing ads on the platform.
Ad Spend Outlook: The report marketers’ survey provides insights into probable media growth areas for 2022. The vast majority of global marketers plan to increase spend on their favoured ad formats: online video, influencer content and social media ads. Many will reduce spend on print ads. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are the platforms set to benefit most.
Discussing the findings, Duncan Southgate commented: “The ad industry has been encouraged by the rapid recovery in 2021, as advertising has been used as one of the levers to fuel recovery in the wider economy. As we emerge into a new media landscape, brands need to understand which consumer and marketer attitudes have changed, and which have stayed the same. Which media brands have retained their appeal, and which have grown stronger? While the pandemic accelerated the growth of digital in every aspect of life, we have seen robustness in consumers’ preference for offline advertising, and some strong local news brands in particular.”
“Marketers need to ensure their strategies respect those preferences alongside the benefits of scale delivered by global digital platforms. TikTok has done an impressive job retaining its differentiated advertising proposition with consumers – even as its user base has almost doubled over the past year. We have also seen the re-emergence of retail as a critical ad platform, both online and physically. Advertising strategies that seamlessly align with omnichannel retail strategies provide a great opportunity for marketers to deliver more popular campaigns.”
Kantar, head of media- South Asia, insights division, Sandeep Ranade added, “Moving into 2022, we will see consumers adopting more and more digital channels and it will impact advertiser’s appetite for digital connection opportunities. Consumers do not differentiate between the way media is bought and hence it will no longer be offline vs online but a balance of reach vs receptivity and global vs local media partners to bridge the gap between what consumers prefer vs what advertisers perceive consumers prefer. We have also seen that Indian consumers generally have more pronounced views on advertising compared to the global audience”
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.
