eNews
JioCinema amps up advertiser advantage for IPL 2024 with a slew of innovations
Mumbai: Viacom18 announced the launch of multiple innovations for advertisers around the upcoming IPL season, including unique offerings that are a first for the Indian broadcasting ecosystem. After digital ad revenues surpassed that of linear TV’s last IPL, reinforcing digital as advertisers’ preferred platform, JioCinema has now expanded the breadth of its offerings to aid advertisers irrespective of their marketing goals or the scale of the business. Each proposition being unveiled this year has been carefully curated to enhance the brand’s proposition and increase the potential of scale and targeting possibilities they can extract digitally.
Every proposition from JioCinema this season has been developed to address a specific use case, such as creating better brand impact, sharper brand integration, friction-free lead generation, and driving better engagement through innovation. Here is a snapshot of JioCinema’s offerings for IPL 2024 with their exciting use cases for advertisers:
Impact
JioCinema has launched its newest high-impact feature, Brand Spotlight that latches on the IPL’s ability to aggregate India in an unrivalled way, especially on opening day. It elevates brand visibility by providing an industry-first opportunity during the first game for five select brands to unveil their IPL campaigns in the opening moments of the first match. This offering will facilitate a marketer’s moment without the conventional boundaries of a mass media campaign. Having a priority spot to launch their engaging IPL opening day blitz will help these five brands play on the audience’s minds that are on the lookout for the most fun ad campaigns of the season. Brands will be able to even tell the story behind their IPL campaigns through the JioCinema app.
In addition to Brand Spotlight, JioCinema’s Masthead will also support video from this season, making it the go-to destination for brands to launch new products, announce sales, unveil new creatives, and more. Another impact property entering the scene this year is Scorecard Branding, which will allow advertisers to build salience among an audience set by displaying sticky behaviour by allowing, the advertiser to own a scorecard, stats, and match analytics.
Innovation
After piloting more than a dozen feeds last IPL, now JioCinema is offering advertisers a chance to own an entire feed. Custom Feeds can be tailored to a brand’s brief to offer them a way to drive the deepest visibility, storytelling, and consideration possible. JioCinema’s innovation for this season has also stretched itself to include Vertical Highlights, packaging match highlights in a shorter vertical orientation akin to trending social media short-form videos.
Engagement
India’s largest live fan engagement opportunity, Jeeto Dhan Dhana Dhan, saw over 50 million participants last season, with over a billion game plays. This season, JioCinema is opening up the high engagement avenue for brands to partner with them offering salience, special brand message integration, deeper engagements on rewards, and an opportunity to gamify their communication at scale.
Ads for Business
This season, an entire set from JioCinema’s advertiser proposition is designed to aid seamless lead generation for advertisers without intruding on the fan’s viewing experience. One such feature is Click to WhatsApp which takes the viewer to a brand’s WhatsApp business chat through a click, while the ad plays on the screen. By overhauling the process of redirecting consumers, JioCinema will help brands talk to their audience one-on-one on WhatsApp while they watch the IPL in PIP mode. On the other hand, Auto-fill Ads is devised to simplify consumer data collection by removing several friction layers in this process. These hard-working midrolls reflect already captured data, leaving the user with just one field to fill, no matter what product, service, or experience they are signing up for.
Integration
One leg of JioCinema’s proposition also focuses on better integration through which brands will now be able to create their own stories and campaigns to reach a wider audience by accessing Cricket’s biggest social media influencer pool, comprising 100+ cricketing legends/influencers and celebs for their social media activations.
“The launch of our array of offerings around IPL 2024 showcases the degree to which customisations are possible in digital advertising along with bringing great value to the table,” said Viacom18 Sports Head of Revenue, Anup Govindan. “For the consumer, we continue removing barriers to accessibility, affordability, and language, while for the advertiser, we continue innovating, democratising the process, and setting new industry benchmarks. Brand Spotlight, in particular, will become an anchor offering in the years to come for its compelling proposition.”
After clocking a record-breaking reach of 450 million during IPL 2023, JioCinema is targeting over 650 million throughout the 2024 season, thus making the launch of JioCinema’s plethora of ad innovations a high-stakes game for advertisers. With the advent of soaring CTV sales and Ultra HD 4K devices commanding a 35 per cent market share within the CTV category, JioCinema will offer advertisers to target the premium universe on IPL for the very first time with the innovative formats available this season.
The JioPhone and JioBharat 4G enabled feature phones from Reliance have democratized internet access, connecting blue-collar workers, farmers, and artisans across urban & rural India. With IPL streaming on these devices, an incremental 35-40 Mn users are expected to be enthralled in their regional language of choice, making the tournament bigger.
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.
