iWorld
Twitter initiated APAC business leadership summit #TwitterUdaan
MUMBAI: Twitter launched its first business leadership summit in Asia titled #TwitterUdaan in Gurgaon. The summit brought together approximately 200 industry leaders over thought-provoking presentations and panel discussions on the theme of #FutureForward.
Along with Twitter’s executives, other representatives present at the inaugural forum were from Future Brands, Group M, HDFC Life, Ogilvy & Mather, OLX, PepsiCo, Starcom, Tata Motors, Unmetric, Vodafone India, Yes Bank, and Yu.
#TwitterUdaan was punctuated with the launch of Twitter’s first-ever #TwitterInfluencerIndex, a study to understand the effects of C-Suite engagement, who are the top CEOs on Twitter are and what constitutes their success on the influential communications platform. The index highlighted the 100 top C-suite executives on Twitter from around the world. The various leaders were Mahindra Group chairman and MD Anand Mahindra, Kotak Mahindra Band executive vice chairman and MD Uday Kotak, Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal, Flipkart executive chairman and founder Sachin Bansal, Olacabs.com co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, Snapdeal.com co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl and InMobi founder and CEO Naveen Tewari.
“India is the growth engine for Asia-Pacific on Twitter. We are committed to India and the launch of #TwitterUdaan is about celebrating the creativity and innovation from India. The time is ripe for India to lead innovation and we want to help them soar and leverage Twitter in the digital age,” said Twitter VP International markets Shailesh Rao. “CEO participation on Twitter leads to better communication and it is heartening to see India account for nearly 50 percent of Asia Pacific C-suite executives listed in the #TwitterInfluencerIndex.”
The summit was focused on five big trends of 2016 i.e. live, video, disruption innovation, content marketing, data, and media-first. The opening keynote on ‘Future is Live’ was presented by Twitter managing director of Southeast Asia, India, Middle East and North Africa Parminder Singh who opened up the floor for engaging conversations with his presentation on Twitter’s live connection to culture.
Following to that was an engaging fireside chat between FutureBrands India MD Shailesh and CEO Santosh Desai on how brands need to build authentic relationships with their customers.
Global Brands and Agencies VP Jean-Philippe (JP) Maheu took the audience through content best practices in ‘Future is Content’ and provided insight on how to engage a customer, hold their attention and why video and media-rich content always wins on the platform.
Brand Strategy Asia Pacific head Steven Kalifowitz challenged advertising norms, showcased case studies and ideas that stood out of the clutter, and asked brands to think out-of-the-box using innovative, disruptive strategies in ‘Disruptive Innovation’.
Guest speaker Unmetric CEO and co-founder Lakshmanan Narayan presented a data-driven future showing how brands can use data to drive social media accountability and business outcomes.
While Twitter Asia Pacific and emerging markets senior director product specialist Maya Hari presented on a media-first future how we are now living at a time where media is increasingly live, interactive, and visual. This led to a thought-provoking panel discussion with guest speakers from CNBC TV18, PepsiCo, Tata Motors and The Economist on how being media-forward is not an option anymore.
#TwitterInfluencerIndex measures how influential the world’s top executives are on Twitter. The Index highlights how CEOs develop their digital influence and their ability to create an effect, change opinions and behaviours, and drive measurable outcomes using Twitter.Reach, relevance and resonance on Twitter are the cornerstones of the Index.
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.
