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CAMM Summit 2022: ‘Ad-tech to allow brands to take control of consumer experience’
Mumbai: Facebook rebranded to Meta in October last year and threw the marketing world into a frenzy by coining a new buzzword ‘metaverse.’ Marketers are often quoted saying that technologies such as AR/VR, blockchain, cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will have a transformative effect on the advertising industry but the implementation of these technologies at scale still has ways to go.
“In digital media, we’ve been comfortable talking in terms of reach, frequency, leads but suddenly there is a challenge that we’re all facing,” said Madison World vice president Kosal Malladi during a panel discussion held recently. The discussion was on ‘new technology experiences in content-tech, ad-tech and mar-tech’ organised by IndianTelevision.com during its Content-Tech, Ad-Tech, Mar-Tech and More (CAMM) Summit and Exhibition 2022. The virtual event was co-presented by PubMatic and industry partner Adjust.
The challenge we’re facing, explained Malladi, is that while there are a lot of people giving ‘gyaan’ about the metaverse, blockchain and everything associated with it, they don’t know how to implement it. “Adtech and martech is evolving so quickly that if we don’t keep pace with the change, we’ll become dinosaurs.”
The discussion was joined by eminent marketers, technologists and media strategists including AsiaAsia India lead product marketing and brand communications Kishen Ramaswamy, Tata Elxsi global practice head for media and new media Ajay Kumar Meher, Verse Innovation vice president monetisation, growth strategy and partnerships Venkatesh Adavi and MIQ India and SAARC head of growth and revenue Varun Mohan.
Starting off the discussion on the applications of blockchain technology, Tata Elxsi’s Ajay Kumar Meher said, “There are people who’re asking the fundamental question of what is the practical use of a blockchain.”
“Blockchain is a shared immutable ledger,” he explained. “It is a process of recording transactions that is unchangeable. It also helps in tracking assets that may be digital assets such as NFTs. Should the asset only be digital in nature? Not necessarily. The sale of a house may be recorded and registered on a blockchain so that the owner can be defined. This would prevent the same property from being sold multiple times to different people.”
In the media and entertainment industry, “blockchain can manage content micropayments. Suppose a broadcaster is buying the rights to a movie and an artist has recorded a song that is played in the movie, then that artist can be paid a specific micropayment every time the movie is played,” said Meher.
He added, “If a content owner would like to sell the rights to his content to various stakeholders via the blockchain then he will be able to track whether the content is being used as stipulated in the agreement. Another level of usage are royalty payments where we can define all the stakeholders in the piece of content and precisely know what is to be paid for a particular usage.”
“Artists who are creating a lot of digital assets may leverage NFTs to define their ownership of that asset,” Meher further said.
Meher shared several use cases on how blockchain could be deployed in the media industry including creating a blockchain-based exchange between advertisers, agencies and publishers to measure exactly how many ads are displayed on the publisher side.
“The wastage of media will be controlled with far more engagement opportunities unlocked by ad-tech,” remarked MiQ India and SAARC head of growth and revenue Varun Mohan. “Ad-tech will play a vital role on the measurement side. Today, If I take the FMCG category as an example, they are facing a lot of challenges in monitoring data that is coming from offline channels. With ad-tech, brands will take ownership of consumer behaviour and engagement via multiple touchpoints that will help them plan their media activation.”
Next Verse Innovation’s Venkatesh Adavi spoke about the use cases for AR/VR in India. He said, “AR is quite ahead in terms of adoption compared to other technologies. It is being used by both people who consume content as well as marketers and media companies who want to talk about their brands and products.”
He added, “VR still suffers from issues such as proliferation of equipment, bandwidth and network coverage that needs to be there to enable the ecosystem. There’s still some heavy lifting required in terms of development of VR content and from an access point of view.”
“AR technology is growing fast as there is a processor and camera in everyone’s hand via the smartphone. What we see on short video app Josh is that users live creating content that can be layered on AR. Brands are also catching up. We get a lot of brands who want to create AR effects, so that they can be a part of the content that consumers create.
“The holy grail of marketing is engagement and AR gives a canvas to marketers to enable their products to be utilised in the videos that consumers are creating. If millions of consumers create videos using brands’ AR effects, then you get so much earned media,” surmised Adavi.
AirAsia’s Kishen Ramaswamy spoke about potential use cases of the metaverse in the airline industry. “Metaverse is a combination of AR/VR but with a real-world economic model. Today, in general, people are more open to having virtual meetings over physical ones, especially in the corporate segment. This opens up people to have experiences outside the workplace. That is important for us as a brand and we’ve been focusing on creating experiences that our audiences would appreciate,” Ramaswamy said.
“For a first-time flier booking a ticket, checking-in and picking your seats can be an intimidating experience,” he stated. “Why not create a metaverse experience where our customers can explore doing those things and learning on their own. For a brand, it is an opportunity to show what they can expect. We expect this use case to become a reality in the near future.”
Watch the panel discussion here:
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.
