iWorld
ALTBalaji creates many firsts with its marketing campaign for latest series Booo-Sabki Phategi
MUMBAI: India’s leading home-grown OTT platform, ALTBalaji has been going full throttle in marketing its latest web-series, Booo-Sabki Phategi. Starring Tusshar Kapoor, Mallika Sherawat, Krushna Abhishek, Sanjay Mishra, Kiku Sharda amongst many others, the series has been garnering a positive response ever since its announcement. The platform not only has gone all guns blazing with its promotions, but has also sketched an interesting 360- degree awareness campaign, that has grabbed eyeballs aplenty.
Constantly in the public eye for its unique marketing campaigns, ALTBalaji, for the promotion of its latest horror comedy web-series, has associated with electronics retail store chain Vijay Sales for in-store branding of the series. The trailer of Booo-Sabki Phategi will be playing on 100 screens at each of the 80+ Vijay Sales stores across metros. This strategic alliance makes ALTBalaji the first-ever OTT platform to explore in-store branding for a web-series, creating visibility to a captive high networth audience, maximising brand recall and business ROI. Speaking about firsts, the series became the first ever web series to be promoted on the popular ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’. With an extensive media push across mediums, the poster of the series grabbed the attention of viewers through multiple billboards placed across the metro cities.
The campaign also included extensive television promotions tapping into the music and news genres widely. As a part of this campaign, the series pioneered unique associations with broadcast channels like India TV to catch the pulse of the Hindi heartland; 9XM music to tap into the youth-based audience. With an intent to further extend the reach of the brand-new show and engage with local audiences, ALTBalaji also roped in cable TV operators across tier 2 & 3 cities of India, to air the trailer of the web-series.
Engaging with millennial audiences on their preferred platforms, ALTBalaji collaborated with content creators across Instagram and TikTok to drive audience engagement on funny dialogues and moments. The tactic has gone viral and is now being picked up organically by multiple influencers.
The trailer went viral and received more than 40 million views on Instagram and an organic reach of 25 Million views on YouTube within 3 days of the launch. With continuous support from bollywood celebrities like Varun Dhawan, Aftab Shivdasani, Celina Jaitely etc, who also loved and shared the trailer.
Within a few days of the launch fans have posted many memes for the web series which have also appeared on top meme pages like Dekh Bhai, Bcbilli, Real Shit Gyaan.
Special quirky and humorous dialogues have been created and seeded amongst Tik Tok influencers to create a cult for ‘Booo’ dialogues.
Commenting on the unique marketing strategy, Divya Dixit, Sr. VP and Head Marketing, ALTBalaji says, “This is the first time, we at ALTBalaji have explored the horror comedy genre which has never been done before for an Indian web-series on the OTT space. Booo… Sabki Phategi is a series which marks its foray into a whole lot of firsts. From being a digital debut for two fine actors, like Tusshar Kapoor and Mallika Sherawat, to being the first series to integrate with ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’ and in-store branding association with Vijay Sales, it has seen it all. Ensuring it receives the required uptake from our audience, we sketched out a robust marketing strategy that penetrates masses of our country. It is good to see audiences appreciating the approach and the show.”
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.
