eNews
NIIT launches online digital marketing course
MUMBAI: NIIT, a global leader in skills and talent development, today announced the launch of their first interactive live, online course in digital marketing. The program is offered in association with Digital Marketing Institute (Ireland) and will be available online for the first time. It is the 37 batch of the Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing (PDDM) – a program uniquely designed for current and aspiring marketing professionals, to help them transform into digital marketers of the future. NIIT has already trained more than 1700 students in digital marketing.
The batch will start on 26 June 2016 onwards and the last date of registration is till 25 June 2016.
For more information visit: http://digitalmarketing.niitcloudcampus.com
Today businesses and consumers are shifting their focus to the digital medium and companies are increasingly engaging their consumers through digital platforms. There are 462 Million total Internet users in India and India’s digital advertising spending is estimated to reach $4 billion by 2020. India’s digital advertising market has grown at a rate of 33% annually between 2010 and 2015. This indicates a larger shift in focus from traditional to digital marketing mediums. These market trends have created tremendous opportunities for professionals who are equipped with the necessary digital skills.
Speaking on the occasion NIIT Ltd chief strategy officer Udai Singh said, “Aligned to NIIT’s strategic focus of developing digital skills ready workforce, the PDDM program is uniquely positioned to meet the changing requirements of the industry. Looking at providing convenience to customers, who don’t want to waste time traveling to the centres, we have launched the first of the series of live online interactive course. The first live online PDDM program will be delivered through a unique pedagogy which is a mix of live expert lectures, case discussions, quizzes and projects for holistic learning. With DMI’s expertise in certification and training we aim to create a globally competitive workforce for the digital marketing industry.”
The Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing is designed for Marketing, Product, Advertising and Sales Professionals who want to build a career in Digital Marketing. It covers all the major areas of Digital Marketing including Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Analytics, Email Marketing and Mobile Marketing. The program content is created by DMI and reviewed by DMI’s Syllabus Advisory Council, comprising of the leading digital brands like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.
Digital Marketing Institute (DMI) is a global leader in training professionals in digital marketing. To date, over 15,000 people in 80 countries have graduated with a DMI qualification, making it the most widely taught digital certification standard in the world.
The Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing Program is led by industry specialists for in-depth understanding of the program. The Program Director is Dr Neeraj Sharma, who holds a PhD in Management from IIT Delhi and a Masters in Human Resource Management from IIT Kharagpur. He has facilitated the education of over 25000 working professionals. The Batch Faculty, Professor Ratan KK, an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, is also a visiting faculty teaching eMarketing at IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Udaipur and other top business schools. He is an entrepreneur and digital marketing practitioner with over 3800 hours of Digital Marketing training experience. The program will be taught through a unique pedagogy which includes expert live online classes along with case studies in each module complemented by Guest Sessions from Industry Experts for in-depth understanding. The live online platform has been created in such a manner that the students will have a better experience than that at the classroom. The candidates can access the expert learning sessions from the convenience of their home, direct on their device with a good broadband connection.
The candidates can ask questions to the expert and get their doubts cleared. They will have access to various learning resources and can also have discussions with peers and answer the assessments online thus giving them the same experience as that of a classroom training but now direct to their device, at their convenience at home.
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
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.
