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How to induct modern marketing in your business?
A clever digital campaign, captivating brand activation or a smart app – what constitutes modern marketing? Does one need to think beyond activation and digital strategies to become a modern marketer in the true sense of the term?
More than 83 per cent of CEOs of global corporations consider marketing to be the driver for the lion's share of their company's growth. Most senior leaders are of the opinion that their marketing strategies have to modernise, but they have little idea of how to actualise their ideas.
Modern marketing not only needs new capabilities but also select enablers to support these new capabilities to meet the new demands of the market. The third and fourth quarters of 2020 will usher new challenges that modern marketers have to address for their company's growth.
Mindset Shift: What you need to become a successful modern marketer!
A majority of the CMOs are facing stagnation due to the lack of knowledge about the full set of changes necessary. Without the clarity of the inter-dependencies of the elements needed for a shift in mindset, most marketers gravitate towards isolating only the elements they are familiar with.
Ignoring some elements necessary for developing modern marketing solutions can lead to the creation of blind spots, which may lead to frustration, delays, and loss of ROI. A successful development of modern marketing solutions requires three mindset shifts.
Making a modern marketer: Three necessary mindset shifts
Here are three mindset shifts that act as the foundation of the development of the modern marketer –
i. Working together with all CxO
It’s impossible to drive company growth while working in silos. It is now the responsibility of the good modern marketer to collaborate with all the departments from production and sales, to creative and designing.
Chief marketing officers (CMOs) can drive greater and faster growth by working with C-suite colleagues as partners by acting as “unifiers”. The “unifiers” collect information on how working together can help the CIOs, CEOs, CFOs and the other CxOs.
CMOs should serve as the role model for every member of the marketing team. They should lead by example, and show the marketing team members how to collaborate with other colleagues from other teams with respect and ease.
ii. Putting the Customers Before Everything Else
Companies have held a customer-centric mindset for a long while. "The customer's always right" or "the customer always comes first" isn't a new concept.
Modern marketing involves the CMO and the rest of the marketing team knowing and facing the set of challenges a company must overcome to achieve customer-centricity and to scale at the same time.
These steps can include –
· Addressing customer pain points to solve them and meet their evolving necessities
· Setting up a centralized data platform for easy access to all customer profiles by authorized employees
· Generation of real-time insights from customer journeys
· Measurement of customer interactions and site analytics
· Using the insights to design customer-centric journeys and address consumer concerns
Customer segmentation and micro-segmentation are two important tasks that can enable the CMOs to develop a more customer-centric mindset ideal for the modern marketing team.
iii. Focusing on reallocation of assets, new investment opportunities and monitoring returns
Today, it is possible for every marketer to measure the returns from every channel they have used and are using for marketing their brand/products/services. For example, even when upgrading a company’s website design, one has to measure the impact in terms of organic traffic, by A/B testing. And use the data to make underlying changes to the design or content.
The ROI mindset requires CMOs to work with the concept that the money they are investing is their own. Therefore, it demands close monitoring of the assets, quantitatively measuring the returns every quarter and drawing insights from market trends before reallocating any resources.
The ROI mindset demands a close working relationship between the CMO and CFO of the company. It will not only build the company's financial profile but help unlock additional investment opportunities for the company leaders. Moreover, it will demonstrate the importance of modern marketing to the board of directors of the company.
These three mindset shifts are inevitable and indispensable for any corporation that wants to adopt modern marketing. A marketer has to rely on modern data sciences, technology, consumer feedback, market surveys and unified working conditions to transform themselves into a modern marketer.
(The author is iXceed Solutions MD & co-founder. The views expressed are her own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)
MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.
If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.
What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.
At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.
When OTT finally understood the time problem
For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”
That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.
What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.
Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:
* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing
* Completion rates continued to slide
* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer
At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.
Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.
Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.
There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.
By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.
This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.
In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.
Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.
Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift
ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.
From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.
What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:
* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle
While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.
Why audiences started responding differently
One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.
What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.
On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.
A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:
* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day
This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.
Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.
2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality
The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.
Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:
* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?
This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.
Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.
Failures Became Visible Faster
2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.
Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.
Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.
Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.
The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.
OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit
Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.
OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.
Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.
That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.
What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry
By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:
* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego
Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.
Looking Ahead
Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.
Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.
Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.
2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
