The holiday season has always been the core battleground for brand marketing, and brands are reaching out to consumers through various channels. At present, India has the sixth-largest global use of micro-sphere applications and is expected to grow tenfold in its market by 2030, which creates an excellent opportunity for brands to use micro-spheres to sustain business influence.
In a keynote speech at the second Mumbai Dialogue on Short Formats, Big Impact Leadership Summit 2025, organized by ShareChat & Moj, India’s media giant, and ETBrandEquity, Neha Markanda, Chief Business Officer, ShareChat & Moj, noted that cultural assets and micro-short plays were redefining brand narratives.
Today, short videos are deeply integrated into the daily lives of their audiences, shaping the behaviour, traditions and rituals of the festival. Neha Markanda explains how the micro-short drama combines the sensitivity of story narratives with the ease of sliding browsing, and explores the logic of “culture: new consumer insight”.
Emphasizing ShareChat & Moj ‘ s leadership in this area, she proposed the goal of creating India ‘ s largest advertising support for the short-run drama platform, with a target of 100 million users by December 2025. “We have moved beyond current trends. It was a form designed to slide the priority economy: both dramatic, sticky and two-way empowerment for viewers and advertisers, she said.
For brands, the opportunity lies in a moment of genuine cultural inclusion. Neha Markanda notes: “The impact of local language advertising has tripled on the platform, with 63 per cent of short video interactions currently coming from the second and third-line market. The short play gives marketers the opportunity to participate in people’s dreams, celebration and association processes. This is not only about touch, but also about resonance.”
She redefined the successful criteria for holiday marketing: “Stop focusing solely on brand assets and start building cultural assets. When brand stories are embedded in the celebration scene in the user’s mother tongue through a micro-short play, the effects of authenticity, trust and scale are realized simultaneously.”
At the meeting, Priyanka Verma, Chief Marketing Officer, Dacan; Anita Kotwani, Chief Client, Telecommunications South Asia; Lalatendu Das, Chief Executive Officer, Lion Media, South Asia; Nithya Ravi, Assistant Vice President and Global Media Director, Godrej Consumer Products; and Abhishek Shetty, Marketing Manager, Swigigy, discussed how brands could capture high-intensity audiences on a large scale.
It is the content, not the promotional advertising, that drives holiday consumption that is at the heart of brand-building relevance.Priyanka Verma notes that “the contemporary content is not only about increasing memory or visibility, but also about leading consumption decisions. The relevance of festivals, the moment of highest emotional concentration, becomes truly evident when brands can be completed through preparation, rituals and even after festivals. The key is empowerment, not mere sales.”
Today, algorithms shape consumer preferences for content, which means that brands need to focus on cultural moments rather than large marketing activities.Anita Kotwani stressed: “The challenge for brands is to stop chasing a single big event and move on to 400 microcultural explosions throughout the year. The key to success lies in identifying cultural moments and translating them into scenario-based brand dialogues that drive immediate interaction and action.”
However, hard-on-the-down cultural discourse can trigger consumer programmes, brands need to understand cultural connections in depth, respect differences, provide immersional integration experiences at digital and physical points of contact, and provide sustainable festivities based on real consumption scenarios.
Contemporary festival marketing is no longer a one-size-fits-all strategy. Brands need to be integrated into culture through indigenous languages and real participation. Micro-short dramas provide brand flexibility for non-intrusive integration into cultural contexts and are a real driving force for festivities.