iWorld
How OTT players re-calibrate OOH advertising during social distancing
MUMBAI: The world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented crisis in living memory that has almost crippled our everyday lives and left the whole country deserted. And the reality has been unpalatable to the media and entertainment industry, especially the outdoor advertising segment, which is bearing the brunt of the stay-at-home/social distancing stipulations.
The out-of-home (OOH) medium has been one of the go-to points for OTT services in India so much so that leading streaming platforms had started outdoing even retail brands in OOH advertising. Now, with that option totally shut, streaming services are looking at ways to re-calibrate their ad spends.
In this new series, we explore how the OTT industry is coping with its communication strategies amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We start off with the OOH industry.
As people have suddenly been forced to shift to seek entertainment online, digital advertising has gained traction. However, none of the platforms denies the importance of OOH in the media mix.
ALTBalaji marketing, analytics & direct revenue SVP Divya Dixit says that the platform has been at the forefront of executing creative and innovative OOH formats for its varied shows. However, she mentions that their strategies have always been a mix of varied tools, and in times such as these, they seek to explore the rest of them with innovation and uniqueness.
"For marketers, with OOH advertisement being suspended, it does create a dent in the overall marketing outreach. As all of us exercise the mandatory stay-at-home-stay-safe measure during the lockdown, audiences across the country are now consuming content digitally every part of the day. In such a situation, digital marketing, buoyed by social media, influencer marketing, meme marketing, OBD calls, SMS and email blasts etc., can prove to be the best bet for brands right now. Especially for a digital-first platform like ours, it promises to play a crucial role in the overall marketing mix, seeing 50 per cent of the allotted marketing budget," she adds.
Hungama Digital Media COO Siddhartha Roy comments that the stay-at-home measure has enabled the TV and digital media to find captive audiences while the audience for OOH and other forms of outdoor and experiential marketing has decreased dramatically. "As a platform, we realised a long time ago that our audience is present on the digital medium; hence, our marketing strategy, even in the past, has been heavily skewed towards digital and social platforms," he says.
Broadcaster-led platforms, like VOOT, ZEE5, etc., whose traditional business has also been bullish on OOH, accept it as a key component of the media mix. Voot Select and Viacom18 youth, music and English entertainment head Ferzad Palia says that outdoor is very important when a new service is launching, especially in markets like Mumbai. But he also adds that they have never been over-indexed on outdoor; hence, cutting back on this area is not a huge change. While having an outdoor option could have been an advantage, he mentions the OOH spends are being shifted to a mix of TV and digital ads.
ZEE5 India SVOD marketing head Reilly Rebello also echoes Palia's thoughts. While terming OOH as a key component of its advertising mix, he does not forget to mention that there are a lot of other mediums that have been used regularly. Rebello also says that they are focusing a lot on digital and TV. ZEE5 India is doing heavy targetted advertising on the ZEE5 app while focusing on other digital mediums. A major part of ZEE5's OOH cost has moved to the digital medium.
However, TheSmallBigIdea CEO and co-founder Harikrishnan Pillai has a different take. He is of the view that outdoor was never a pivot platform for OTT. According to Pillai, while OOH builds perception and is a great reminder medium, it is seldom the core medium. "What outdoor helped OTT do is place itself alongside broadcast television in terms of scale. Over the years, TV has built a perception on the back of the outdoors. So for OTT, which is digital-first, absence of outdoor doesn't matter much in these times, since TV, too, isn't making much use of it," he says.
"Given the stay-at-home, stay-safe mandate, a lot of outdoor media has had to be removed from the marketing media mix, but at MX Player, we firmly believe that all else can wait, but your daily dose of entertainment must go on. We've gone live with eight shows just in the month of March and the first week of April," MX Player marketing and business partnerships head Abhishek Joshi states.
While OOH hoardings stay barren for now, the hope is that the industry will be back on track after this crisis passes us.
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.
