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Gracenote says advertisers are botching connected TV with wrong targeting tactics
NEW YORK: Connected television was supposed to be the performance marketer’s dream: precision targeting on the biggest screen in the house. A decade in, it’s not delivering. American advertisers will spend $26.6 billion on CTV this year, up 12 per cent from 2024, according to the IAB. Yet 27 per cent cite lack of insight into whether ads reach their intended audience as their top challenge. Nearly a third rate CTV only “moderately effective” despite pouring money in.
The problem is a mismatch between strategy and medium. Marketers are treating CTV like social media—chasing users with demographic and behavioural targeting—when they should be focusing on what people watch, not just who’s watching. A Gracenote survey of 600 American brand and agency executives found 30 per cent rank brand awareness as their top CTV objective, with customer retention a distant fourth. Yet 80 per cent still prioritise audience-based targeting over contextual approaches.
“CTV has not delivered the scale and premium reach that marketers expect of the largest screen in the house largely based on the use of narrow targeting tactics,” said Gracenote VP of partnerships Jake Richardson. “By taking better advantage of contextual targeting capabilities with their CTV campaigns, they have new opportunities to drive both return on ads spend and the scale they’ve been looking for.”
The irony is sharp. CTV now accounts for 48 per cent of American viewing time, overtaking live television’s 46 per cent in the first quarter of 2025. Ad-supported content makes up 45 per cent of streaming viewership. The audience is there, engaged and watching ads. But marketers haven’t adapted their playbook.
Nearly 46 per cent of survey respondents have shifted at least 26 per cent of their budgets to CTV over the past three years. Among financial services, retail, technology and healthcare brands, that figure rises to 52 per cent. A quarter now allocate 40 per cent or more of total budgets to CTV. Yet confidence remains shaky. Only 28 per cent consider their CTV spending “extremely effective.”
The culprit, according to Gracenote, is fragmentation and missing metadata. With 85 per cent of CTV buys purchased programmatically, incomplete or inconsistent content data leaves platforms blind. Nearly 70 per cent of respondents say lack of standardisation is at least a modest challenge when developing campaigns.
Free ad-supported television (Fast) channels illustrate the problem. Gracenote tracked nearly 1,850 active Fast channels distributing more than 182,000 programmes as of July 2025. Pluto TV, Tubi and The Roku Channel accounted for 5.7 per cent of total American television usage in May 2025, up 36 per cent year-on-year. Yet the metadata is patchy. Before enrichment, 55 per cent of sports programmes on Fast channels lacked original air date information. A sample of 28 sports programmes shared by Rain the Growth Agency found only eight included proper content titles—three simply said “tv.”
This matters because knowing whether a sports event is live, which teams are playing, or whether it’s a playoff game is crucial for advertisers. TV listing data can distinguish an MLB game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants from a Liga MX match between Santos Laguna and Pumas UNAM—both aired live on Fast channels on 12 July 2025.
When asked if standardised content metadata would boost confidence in CTV planning, 62 per cent of respondents said yes. More than half said it would justify higher spending. When asked about TV schedule information, 72 per cent said it would help with planning and investing—rising to 78 per cent among financial services, retail, technology and healthcare advertisers.
The solution, Gracenote argues, is contextual targeting at programme level. Only nine per cent of respondents currently prioritise this approach, compared with 29 per cent for demographic targeting. Yet contextual signals—knowing a programme has a TV-MA rating, includes adult language, has a gritty mood, or involves arms trafficking—provide the brand suitability insight that audience targeting can’t.
The pitfalls of over-focusing on existing customers are well documented. Nike’s 2020 direct-to-consumer pivot, which neglected broader brand building, became a cautionary tale last year. Despite CTV’s addressable nature, excluding anyone outside the funnel inhibits future growth. Marketers want CTV for brand building, but to capitalise they’ll need to embrace a simple truth: what people watch matters as much as who’s watching.
The survey was conducted online between 10 and 20 July 2025, polling brand and agency associates with director-level titles or above across media, entertainment, telecommunications, retail, financial services, automotive, consumer goods and healthcare.
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.
