eNews
Warner Bros Discovery International launches WBD AIM
Mumbai: Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) International has launched WBD AIM (audience insights and measurement), a first-party data platform that enables advertisers to target their campaigns with new levels of precision, across several markets throughout EMEA, APAC and LatAm spanning its most engaged assets including CNN, Max, discovery+ and Eurosport.
WBD AIM will broaden WBD’s audience targeting capabilities with access to the vast library of its first-party datasets from across the WBD portfolio and touchpoints, ranging from registration and behaviour to intent and purchase.
This offering also allows advertisers to place contextual ad placements with relevance, leading to an optimisation of campaigns and ROI for advertisers; key when audiences are overloaded with information and their attention is selective.
According to industry reports, enhanced targeting and contextual capabilities backed by deeper audience insights would improve CTV with 86 per cent of consumers saying that personalised experience increases their brand loyalty.
Via WBD AIM, advertisers will be able to access a series of actionable audience segments and campaign insights built from key events or moments based on datasets spanning; WBD’s streaming service discovery+, CNN, Food Network UK, and across WBD sport entities on Max and discovery+ throughout EMEA, in a summer which has just witnessed the first Olympic Games in Europe for 12 years.
WBD AIM will expand across the company’s much-loved brands and franchises to bring datasets from gaming, theatrical, consumer products and experiences into a single addressable solution alongside premium sport and entertainment.
The AIM technology, originally built and launched by CNN International Commercial in 2015, has been optimised for CNN’s global clients over the last nine years and is a proven success for advertising partners ahead of this wider rollout across WBD. WBD AIM now launches internationally, and in the UK & Ireland brands including Adidas, British Airways and Lavazza are already utilising the platform to better tailor their campaigns this summer.
WBD’s continued focus is to partner with leading technology providers to develop products and services that will enhance measurement capabilities, brand lift, incremental reach and new data sources from the WBD portfolio, all of which will be housed under WBD AIM and bought to market.
Warner Bros. Discovery Global & UK&I, head of ad sales & brand partnerships, Mike Rich said, “As media consumption undergoes a profound transformation, traditional targeting strategies are evolving. This fundamental shift underscores the importance for media owners to harness the power of first-party data and audiences.
“WBD AIM allows us to navigate these complexities and tailor content and marketing efforts with precision across multiple touchpoints, as has been seen through CNN International’s use of the AIM technologies to date. With Warner Bros. Discovery’s vast portfolio of brands, franchises and touchpoints, with everything from streaming to shopping, Wheeler Dealers to the Wizarding World and 90 Day Fiancé to the Olympic Games Paris 2024, we have a unique ability to gain deep understanding of audiences across the most diversified portfolio in the industry and bring this to brands and advertisers, whilst ensuring the best possible ad experience for our consumers.”
CNN International Commercial SVP, digital revenue, strategy and operations Rob Bradley said, “AIM is a solution originally designed, developed and grown at CNN with demonstrated success over the last nine years. The launch of WBD AIM marks the next generation of a continually evolving platform that is now expanded across much of the WBD universe with added local expertise. It enables brands to access the unique data touch points we have across our unsurpassed portfolio. Through an enterprise-level global data infrastructure, it can power impactful targeting to match client objectives and KPIs locally, regionally, and globally with in-depth reporting that reveals powerful insights to drive real business decisions.”
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.
