In this op-ed, Thinkberll co-founder and chief thinker Adam Ferrier, explores how microdramas are giving brands a more enduring way to tap into culture.
This week in popular culture we’ve seen the Hyrox poo saga, Sydney Sweeny launch Novig controversially fusing sex and sports, and the CEO of the Council of Fashion Designers of America resign after a PETA protest.
And it’s not even Thursday.
In the world of content things move fast, and associating yourselves with blips of culture is becoming impossible. How does one maintain cultural relevance instead of trying to chase every crazy cultural moment?
Consider these three significant industry dynamics:
Advertising is under pressure. This is not news. Budgets are tighter. Timelines are shorter. Media is more fragmented. Consumers are more avoidant. Companies need new ways to connect with them. They want work that builds the brand, shifts the sales numbers, wins attention, travels organically and generates PR. It also has to work in six seconds and be reformatted for seventeen different platforms. Ideally by Tuesday.
Our friends in TV and film have it even worse. Audiences are shrinking and fragmenting, streaming services are fighting over subscriptions, and production costs remain frighteningly high.
Social media captures attention but has no idea what to do with it. Brain rot, anyone? The algorithms are still chasing cat videos, dance crazes, people named Max, freak dress reveals (‘ll explain later) all whilst ignoring brand-building activity.
Into this highly dysfunctional three-way cultural relationship walks, the unifier, the peacemaker, the value creator. The microdrama. Yes, seriously. The biggest small thing to happen in marketing in many years.
Microdramas are short, serialised stories made predominantly for mobile phones and watched vertically on social media. Episodes are generally between one and three minutes long, highly compressed and constructed around a series of hooks and cliffhangers. Like a traditional soap, but sliced and diced.
The form began its explosive growth in China, where platforms discovered that audiences would (pay to) watch dozens of tiny episodes featuring secret billionaires and forbidden romances. However, the format has crossed the ocean and is now massive in North America, with approximately 90 million people watching regularly. And in Australia? Well, it’s now taking off.
Tinder helped pioneer the space here with Love Songs, an Australian TikTok-native relationship series that attracted millions of views. More recently, Samsung launched The Elephant in the Room, a three-part workplace mystery built around its Galaxy technology. They tried. Vaseline created the vertical dating series The Afterglow. They succeeded. Meanwhile, Nine and Ronde continue the brilliant social meets TV experiment with its Bondi based micro-reality series FLEX.
Further afield in another micro mystery drama example Life360 put Jamie Oliver through a fictional midlife crisis while his family tracked his whereabouts using the app.
As the category mainstreams, it’s morphing from microdrama to micro-reality, micro-comedy and so on. Collectively, they all indicate something significant: brands, social platforms and entertainment are converging to give consumers longer storylines, allowing them to watch branded entertainment where they are, on their phones.
In microdramas, brands have finally found a commercial model that allows them to make and distribute content people choose to watch, rather than paying to interrupt someone else’s entertainment.
The psychology behind them is worth considering too.
First, stories create what psychologists call narrative transportation. When people become absorbed in a story, they are less likely to scrutinise every persuasive claim and more likely to experience the message emotionally. The audience isn’t processing an argument about a brand; it is following a storyline within the brand’s world.
Second, microdramas weaponise the information gap. Give people enough information to create a question, but not enough to answer it, and curiosity creates forward momentum. In microdramas, the audience comes in late and leaves early, allowing them to piece things together. This binds them to the content.
Third, serialisation creates repeated exposure without just repeating the ad, giving people familiarity plus novelty: recognisable characters, worlds and brand assets, but a changing story. That creates memories, with the brand playing a central role.
Microdramas are part of a broader move into narrative storytelling within social media, and they’re here to stay. This is not simply a new aspect ratio. It requires a different storytelling rhythm, a different production and distribution model and, most importantly, the confidence to let entertainment do the selling. They are a way of maintaining the storyline without having to jump on every trend.
Anthony Freedman spoke about the new golden age of branded entertainment a year ago. What he didn’t mention was that this golden age would henceforth be known as the era of the microdrama.
Brands originally invented the soap opera. A century later, they are going to reinvent it…. one micro-episode at a time.
