iWorld
Prime Video introduces Jaggu Dada mode in April Fool’s Day campaign
Mumbai: Prime Video, India’s most loved entertainment destination, today unveiled a Jaggu Dada Mode, a faux feature that allows users to watch their favourite shows and movies in the iconic vocabulary of the legendary Jackie Shroff a.k.a Jaggu Dada. The playful hoax planned for April Fool’s Day, gave the audiences a glimpse of what their favourite shows and movies would sound like with this mode turned on, with Jaggu Dada’s dub lending a hilarious touch to each scene. Featuring the evergreen Jackie Shroff, the campaign is written and conceptualised by Bare Bones Collective.
In a parody of a traditional feature ad, B-Town’s beloved Bhidu or Jackie Shroff himself showcased how he would dub over fan-favourite and iconic shows like Pataal Lok and The Family Man, infusing them with his trademark slang. The outcome? Cult dialogues got Bhidu-fied, just like everything else he does.
Prime Video is on a mission to be the entertainment destination of choice for every Indian customer, and the latest campaign cranks up the fun quotient. The Juggu Dada faux feature campaign pays a subtle nod to the fun and carefree spirit of legendary ‘Bhidu’ a.k.a Juggu Dada, perfect for April Fool’s Day, an occasion reserved for laughter, pranks and playful trickery. The campaign comes on the back of incredible consumer love for Juggu Dada’s latest cinematic project – Prime Video’s Mast Mein Rehne Ka, where he plays the role of a widower.
Speaking about the campaign, Jackie Shroff said, “Life is all about having fun and living to the fullest. And what better day than April Fool’s Day to practice this philosophy. When I was approached for this campaign, I absolutely loved the idea. The thought of dubbing my favourite shows and movies and giving them a new twist was an opportunity too hard to miss. I am glad to have had the chance to bring a smile on people’s faces this April Fool’s Day. Sab bhidu log ko mast rehna chahiye…that is all I wish for and that is all I want to say through this campaign.”
Written by Anuya Jakatdar, Girish Narayandass, Manaswi Mohata, Rahul Nair and Astle Fernandes, the campaign went live on Prime Video’s YouTube and Instagram.
Sharing her thoughts on the campaign, Bare Bones Collective co-founder Anuya Jakatdar said, “We had a blast writing this campaign. The entire writing team was in Jaggu Dada Mode for two weeks. A big thank you to the team at Prime Video for letting us channel our inner Bhidu. And of course the man himself, Jackie Sir, for being a total delight to work with.”
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.
