What If Your Next Video Campaign Was a Branded Entertainment Mini-Series Instead of an Ad?
In the U.S., the microdrama audience reached 66 million monthly active viewers in 2025, up from only 26 million in 2024. That's growth of roughly 154% in one year. And brands are tapping into it.
What is a micro-drama series?
It’s essentially a TV show or entertaining mini-series that lives on social media mostly formatted for vertical viewing and horizontal viewing on YouTube. These 30-second to multi-minute episodes follow the same actors/characters and storyline, opening with a bold dramatic hook and ending each episode with a strong cliffhanger that keeps the viewer hooked into following the mini-series and viewing the next episode. They’re designed for short bursts of entertainment, emotional tension, and easy consumption right from your phone screen making it easy to get invested in each character and thickening plot line.
How are brands tapping into this format?
Many brands are investing money into producing their own branded mini-series because they’re realizing one thing - entertainment earns audience attention and builds brand equity. Everyone is selling, we are constantly bombarded with buy this, buy that, sign up for this, and so on and so fourth that it becomes noise because it all sounds and looks the same and makes it easy for the audience to skip and scroll past.
They have more control ever to watch what they want and and statistics are all pointing at the fact that micro-dramas are the new thing. ReelShorts, which is essentially the netflix of vertical series, has been leading the micro-drama vertical genre. They realized something early, people are obsessed with this format and the numbers speak for themselves - microdramas will generate about 14 billion dollars this year.
The business around the format is exploding as well. People are becoming fans of these series as long as they follow the formula:
- Hook
- Entertain
- Create attachment
- Build familiarity
- Bring people back
The goal is to get your audience and customers to spend time with your brand. These episodes allow people to become invested with the character archetypes of your brand. The stories can be built around your actual customers world and navigating a dilemma or typical storyline that your brand solves. The goal is not to focus the story or the world around your product or service. Your product definitely exists in the series but in the background. This is the most important thing to nail because if you miss this you will lose the audience. The the goal is for the storyline concept to carry the series while your product or service is existing more so in the background. There are so many subtle, tasteful ways for product integration but this requires great writing and storytelling so that people can relate and see themselves in the characters of these micro-dramas. The most successful series are either built around comedy, romance, workplace sitcoms, scary genery, mockumentary style, reality, dating, etc. and the list goes on.
Let’s take a look at real life examples of brands producing episodic microdrama mini-series.
1. Adobe Acrobat - “The Marketers”
Adobe produced a workplace comedy and drama episodic series that played primarily on YouTube with short episodic cutdowns played on TikTok and Instagram.
This is a five episode scripted series that follows a team of marketing professionals who work at Adobe and need to come up with a great campaign by a certain deadline.
The story is built around the absurdity of working in marketing, the typical stereotypes, and drama that goes into pitching marketing campaigns. Everyone in marketing watches the series and can immediately relate to the brainstorming process, how presentations are built, how ideas are shaped and how Acrobate PDF ultimately lives in the background solving the problems they face.
Link: https://youtu.be/PXuiGq9--6o?si=HjYKivbmiF_oVxEG
2. Bilt - “Roomies”
Bilt, is a membership program and company that rewards people for paying rent. They created a mini-series called Roomies which is in a short-form mockumentary format about girl named Ellie who plays a 25-year-old moving from Ohio to New York and figuring out roommates and her life in the big city.
A literal series that can explain the customer profile of one of Bilts target audience but a fleshed out episodic series which are roughly two minutes each. In this format Bilt create a social media profile called Roomies and dedicated the entire social account to the show rather than simply showing up on Bilt’s social profiles.
In the first nine episodes Bilt refrained from showing any Bilt branding or product integration. They made the show strictly for people to invest in the story and characters and that’s exactly what happened. After they garnered viewers, opt-in and audience retention throughout the season, only then the show introduced Bilt-related features and benefits more organically.
The formula is simple “Entertainment First, Advertising Second”. If people have made it nine episodes in they have become pure fans. It’s quite smooth sailing from there to really build the product into the story more organically in a way that lands effortlessly into the plot. Remember, it requires good writing and tasteful integration. This is really important. Forcing viewers to watch an advertisement is not the way.
The main takeaway from this is that you can build stories and content around your customer’s lifestyle and problems they experience without needing to talk about the product. Bilt Customer Profile Themes: Young adults needing to rent, finding apartments, finding roommates, moving to NYC, affording NYC, leaving college, becoming a young adult or in other words “adulting” - these are all lifestyle pillars, problems, and situations that fall into the category the perfect audience and customer archetype for a company like Bilt. Now take those elements and tell a story.
Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKtI8a7sQoh/
3. Crocs - “Charmed to Meet You”
Crocs is another brand that committed to a scripted micro-drama-as-marketing series. This is a five part episodic branded show in partnership with Reel Shorts which was inspired by a real Croc employee’s story falling for the boy next door.
This is a romantic series about a single woman in her early twenties facing the anxiety of being alone during Valentines Day, when she notices a pair of plain men’s crocs outside a neighboring door in her apartment building. Her friends encourage her to talk to the mysterious neighbor so she starts flirting with him by secretly decorating his crocs with charms.
Link: https://youtube.com/shorts/vJhx1JahuBs?si=Zx_eWz8xVhylCXma
4. Maybelline — "Maybe This Christmas"
This was another romantic series about two New Yorkers flirting across their apartment building windows. The brand cleverly built a connection between Maybelline's “Instant Eraser Concealer” product and the lead character “concealing” a secret, which made the product benefits parallel to the story and the joke.
Link: https://youtu.be/7rfA-YQ9Jl8?si=YmKZtDYHtHfFmB_j
5. Native / Proctor & Gamble - "The Golden Peer Affair"
P&G reinvented another classic soap opera mini-series thriller about identical sisters, a stolen diamon, a romance and mystery all intertwined while Native, the personal care brand product, is naturally weaved into the plot.
Link: https://youtu.be/8e1nDedlpic?si=GS7ssZ4lSknMxXhS
How do you go about producing your own Branded Mini-Series or Episodic MircroDrama?
It first starts with a quick discovery and understanding your brand and your customer profile. Reverse-engineer those customer profile stories and pain points and go through that discovery. Almost every movie, TV Show, or story follow a formulaic story arc that captures the viewer and carries them from start to finish. It needs to be something someone can relate, that someone can be your target audience but remember you are not selling, persuading or forcing the audience to understand your product. You’re telling a great story about a character, in a world possibly relevant to the world your customer relates to, their journey, and how they overcame a problem.
- Start with your audience, not the product
- Establish the world your brand lives in
- Develop the concept to be really entertaining
- Create strong characters in the story
- Define the season theme and arc
- Figure out how to integrate the product organically into the show
- Produce and write a script for the platform of choice (hook, pacing, story, cliffhanger)
- Film it all at once as if it’s one long-form production, then cut it down from there
- Build marketing material around the show (trailers, teasers, billboards, bts, etc.)
It could look a lot like this:
Ep 1: Introduce the character, world and problem. End with a hook. Ep 2: The character tries to solve the problem and makes it worse. Ep 3: Introduce a new obstacle, relationship or revelation. Ep 4: Stakes rise. Something changes. Ep 5: The biggest conflict or cliffhanger. Ep 6: Payoff, resolution or a setup for another season.
This is not to say commercials and ads do not work. Traditional advertising has been around for years but the truth is, currency follows attention, and if all the evidence and statistics show that people are scroll-stopping at this form of content, then why not figure out how to make it work within your own world and brand?
If you run into issues on creativity, Feel Right Inc. is a full-service production company that supports branded mini-series, microdramas, and scripted episodic content. Feel Right Inc. can support you in developing concepts, branded series, and microdramas. Feel Right Inca. can write your full scripted episodic micro-series and take it all the way through to production and delivery.
Link: www.feelrightinc.com
