Comment
Public relations’ role in the fast-evolving influencer world
MUMBAI: The role of influencers has witnessed major shifts within the evolving landscape of public relations. Once relegated as mere taste makers with a huge following, the influencers have turned into complex collaborators that create brand narratives, build deeper connections with audiences, or effect social commerce. Today, looking into this changing landscape of influencer partnerships requires more than just product promotion but rather an authentic and deeper-rooted relationship with audiences.
As public relations embraces this new reality, it becomes essential to understand the trends that are transforming the influencer landscape, without which a brand will not be able to adjust in order to stay relevant, ethical, and effective in their campaigns.
The shift from mega-influencers to micro and nano-influencers
In its early days, influencer marketing was a channel where brands obsessed over superstars and mega-influencers with millions of followers, believing that a larger reach would translate into a greater impact on the customer. With a more sophisticated shift in the influencer marketing scenario, public relations professionals recognised that engagement is more significant than the number itself.
Today, micro and nano-influencers are driving the most meaningful conversations and creating authentic connections with their very small, yet engaged, audience. Just as these smaller influencers concentrate on building niche followings based on the interests or values of their audiences, so do brands looking to target well-defined and loyal communities.
This means a change for the PR, no longer searching for a name or a size but for brand-aligned truth speakers on issues concerning values, cultures, and messaging. Micro-influencers might not have the reach of celebrities, but because they have a closeness with their audience, they can deliver better RoI in terms of trust, loyalty, and long-term affinity for a brand.
Aniniditaa Gupta
The rise of real and relatable influencers to finding out authenticity over perfection
Gone are the days when influencers could simply post heavily curated pictures and hope for the audience to engage. Nowadays, consumers crave authenticity, and those influencers who share 100 per cent real and unfiltered experiences often succeed better than others who show what’s perceived as flawless.
Audiences want to see influencers dealing with the little nitty-gritty of their difficult lives, talking about mental health talk, or sharing unfiltered moments that make him/her appear human. Brands reaping rewards from this shift have been giving collaborations with influencers who expose human vulnerabilities, honesty, and authenticity in their value.
For PR teams, this means an end to the old-school traditional glossy campaigns in favor of a fresh and transparent approach to their activities. Brands need to learn to embrace the “imperfections” that come with influencer collaborations, allowing for content that resonates with honesty and relatability while still aligning with the brand’s values.
Influencers contributing to social change
The rise of socially conscious consumers has transformed influencer partnerships. Now, they’re social cause advocates raising awareness on matters of interest like the environment, mental health, and social justice. This pressure requires PR professionals to make sure influencers are a good fit with a brand’s values and are not just peddling pitch for that company. Consumers expect that brands should take a stand on serious issues. Influencers driving the conversation can bolster a brand’s reputation. For the PR team it is equally important to formulate authentic, purpose-driven partnerships that resonate with audiences, and not just opportunistically align themselves with trending causes.
The impact of paid and organic content on authentic engagement and brand connection
As influencer marketing grows, the difference between paid and organic content is becoming clearer. Consumers can spot inauthentic, overly promotional posts. Clear guidelines, like FTC rules for labelling paid posts, help with transparency. While paid content offers reach, organic posts feel more natural and connect better with audiences. Public relations account teams should permit influencers to create the content naturally, so that sponsored posts feel like a real part of their message, not just an ad.
Data driven PR
In the past, measuring the success of influencer marketing was subjective-as brands would look at follower numbers, engagement rates, and sales figures. However, in today’s world, the more sophisticated the analytics tools that PR professionals utilize, the better they can gauge the correct level of influence an influencer possesses owing to data reliability.
Insights driven by data now allow brands to track sentiment analysis, audience demographics, and long-term brand loyalty. With this, PR teams can find out the exact ROI of the influencer campaigns, refine their strategy, and ensure they partner with influencers who would positively resonate with their target audience.
Moreover, relying on data can allow public relations professionals to better look towards the evolution of consumers and how that will allow them to keep ahead of trends and consider the types of influencers and content that would drive the most engagement.
Building long-term partnership with influencers
In the past, measuring the success of influencer marketing was subjective-as brands would look at follower numbers, engagement rates, and sales figures. However, in today’s world, the more sophisticated the analytics tools that PR professionals utilise, the better they can gauge the correct level of influence an influencer possesses owing to data reliability.
Insights driven by data now allow brands to track sentiment analysis, audience demographics, and long-term brand loyalty. With this, PR teams can find out the exact ROI of the influencer campaigns, refine their strategy, and ensure they partner with influencers who would positively resonate with their target audience.
Moreover, relying on data can allows public relations professionals to better look towards the evolution of consumers and how that will allow them to keep ahead of trends and consider the types of influencers and content that would drive the most engagement.
Maintaining trust and understanding ethical challenges
As the influencer market expands, there are emerging concerns about ethics and trust-building faults, especially regarding fake followers and undisclosed paid promotions. Brands must guarantee that their influencer partnerships are above-board, ethical, and aligned with their principles. The PR professionals should work with the influencers who maintain integrity and really have genuine connections with their followers. Brands, for their part, need to be proactive in the ethical world, like readily disclosing paid partnerships and avoiding partnering with questionable influencers to protect themselves.
Conclusion
The landscape of influencers is no longer confined to product endorsements. The modern-day influencer is like a storyteller, an advocate, a powerful partner that establishes a reputation and identity. In this new landscape, PR professionals need to adjust their approach and tasks, remain steadfast, and focus on building deeper, long-term productive relationships with influencers.
In this fast-paced, rapidly-evolving environment, agility, trends-monitoring of overcoming all that distracts the audience in every wave of growing and engaging with them at every touchpoint is where success lies. With the right approach, influencer collaborations can ride to the very front of any brand’s PR strategy, paving the way to trust, engagement, and the long-term establishment of lasting connections amid the cacophonic world of digital innovations.
(Aninditaa Gupta is Scenic Communications founder. The views expressed in the article are entirely her own and indiantelevision.com need no subscribe to them.)
(Picture for the main page created using Microsoft Image Designer. No copright infringement is intended)
MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.
If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.
What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.
At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.
When OTT finally understood the time problem
For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”
That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.
What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.
Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:
* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing
* Completion rates continued to slide
* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer
At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.
Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.
Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.
There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.
By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.
This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.
In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.
Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.
Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift
ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.
From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.
What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:
* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle
While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.
Why audiences started responding differently
One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.
What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.
On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.
A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:
* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day
This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.
Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.
2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality
The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.
Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:
* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?
This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.
Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.
Failures Became Visible Faster
2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.
Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.
Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.
Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.
The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.
OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit
Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.
OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.
Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.
That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.
What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry
By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:
* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego
Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.
Looking Ahead
Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.
Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.
Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.
2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
MUMBAI: The lights went out on Indian advertising this Diwali. Piyush Pandey, the wordsmith who turned bus rides and roadside tea into unforgettable campaigns, died on Friday aged 70. Just four months earlier, at the Emvies awards in Mumbai, veterans had touched his feet for blessings while young hopefuls queued for selfies. He looked frail but smiled through every encounter. Humility was his signature; genius was his secret.
Pandey never claimed special talent. His gift was simpler and rarer: he kept his eyes open. The famous Fevicol advertisement—a Jaisalmer bus groaning under passengers clinging to every inch—came from a real sighting. The magic was slapping a Fevicol poster on the back of the bus. “Keep your eyes open, keep your ears to the ground and have a heart willing to accept,” he told newcomers at Ogilvy. It wasn’t a slogan. It was scripture.
He joined Ogilvy & Mather in 1982 at 27, after failing at cricket, tea tasting and construction. When Mani Iyer, who headed the agency, introduced him to me as creative director in the late 1980s, Pandey’s deep, soft voice belied a fierce passion for the craft. Like Roda Mehta, who ran media at Ogilvy, he was generous with his time, patiently explaining the thought behind many a campaign to me. Those campaigns moved hundreds of thousands of crores worth of products off shelves over their lifespans.
His method was observation turned into emotion. The Dum Laga Ke Haisha Fevicol spot was originally made for a smaller brand called Fevitite. The Parekhs, who owned Pidilite, told him the ad was too good to waste. Reshoot it for Fevicol, they urged. He did. That single decision spawned a series of award-winning campaigns and turned Fevicol into the category itself.
His philosophy was disarmingly simple: love life. “Whether you are sipping tea from a roadside vendor or in a five-star hotel, whether you are travelling by second class or in a Mercedes-Benz,” he would say. Great ideas came from loving all of it—the chaos, the mundane, the sublime. “Be open to accepting ideas from the world. Be open to sharing ideas with the world. Learn to talk but most importantly also learn to listen.”
Pandey despised lazy advertising. Technology for its own sake was pointless; celebrities without ideas were useless. “Many TVCs are pathetic these days when they use celebrities. They are made very lazily,” he once said. For him, the idea came first. Technology could enhance it; fame could amplify it. But without a core truth, it was just expensive noise.
He believed consumers, not suits or pony-tailed creatives, made advertising great. “It’s when he or she accepts the product and emotionally bonds with it, the product becomes a brand,” he said. His advice to brand managers was blunt: stop being salesmen. Build brands, not just products.
I lost touch with him for decades as I went about building the indiantelevision.com group and all its ancillary services. Journalism and writing as I used to practice when I was younger was relegated to the background. It was during the pandemic that I reached out to him and requested him to spare some time for an online interview. To my surprise, he remembered me and he readily agreed. It was an interesting conversation about how Ogilvy was serving clients during the pandemic and how its creative edge was being maintained. We had agreed we would speak for 30 minutes, but the conversation went on for an hour. It was peppered with Pandey-isms. But that was the last time we spoke at length to each other, though we said hello to each other at advertising industry get-togethers which I rarely attended. Sadly, for me.
The man who taught India to watch, listen and love has gone silent. But his voice echoes still—in every vernacular tagline, every slice-of-life commercial, every campaign that dares to see India as it truly is. Pandey didn’t just sell products. He gave an entire nation permission to speak in its own accent, to find poetry in the everyday, to believe that the roadside and the boardroom could meet and make magic.
The lights dimmed this Diwali, but the spark he lit—built on observation, fuelled by empathy, sustained by love—will burn for generations. That’s not advertising. That’s immortality.
MUMBAI: Once, they blazed across the Indian media landscape with the swagger of pioneers. Entrepreneur-led behemoths like Subhash Chandra’s Zee Entertainment, Kalanithi Maran’s Sun TV, Prannoy Roy’s NDTV, and Raghav Bahl’s Network18 weren’t just market leaders — they were institutions, holding their own even as foreign giants circled hungrily.
Today, those stars are fading. Some have already fallen.
Network18 and TV18 are now firmly in the grip of Reliance Industries and Disney Star. NDTV, long a bastion of editorial independence, is under the control of the Adani Group. Its founders — Roy and Radhika — have exited stage left, their names now relics of an era that once prized journalistic idealism.
Zee, once the crown jewel of Indian broadcasting, is barely hanging on. The Chandra family — once majority owners — now clutch a meagre four-odd per cent stake. It’s a dramatic fall from grace fuelled by Subhash Chandra’s ill-advised adventures into infrastructure. To bankroll these forays, he pledged Zee shares, opening the gates to lenders who came calling. The result: a sharp dilution of promoter ownership and a credibility crisis. The failed merger with Sony’s Indian arm, Culver Max Entertainment, only added insult to injury — scuppered reportedly due to concerns about Zee’s financial hygiene. A company once viewed as squeaky clean had its reputation muddied.
Sun TV, the fourth of the old guard, is also showing cracks. Helmed with iron discipline by Kalanithi Maran, it long stood as a symbol of stability. But the facade is now under strain. A family feud has burst into public view, with brother Dayanidhi Maran accusing Kala of wresting control of Sun TV through backdoor share acquisitions. Legal notices have flown, regulatory filings issued, and the company insists all was above board. Still, some reputational damage has been done — and the gossip mills are churning.
The result is a media map being redrawn in real time. Where once these founders shaped the narrative, today they’re either sidelined, embattled, or ousted. And as corporate titans and conglomerates take over, the question is whether passion-led media can survive in an era of balance sheets, bottom lines, and boardroom power plays.
India’s media isn’t short on ambition. But nostalgia alone won’t stop the sun from setting on yesterday’s giants.
MIB sets OTT accessibility rules, mandates captions and audio description
Boney Kapoor acquires remake rights of Tamil political satire Thalaivar Thambi Thalaimaiyil
Netflix India names Rekha Rane director of films and series marketing
Zabeen signs off from TV9 after shaping the network’s public voice
Dhawan steps up to bat for Delhi’s grassroots sports push
Orient Beverages pops the fizz with steady Q3 gains and rising profits
Cheekatilo shines in the dark with record debut on Prime Video
These ’90s fashion trends are making a comeback in 2017
The final 6 ‘Game of Thrones’ episodes might feel like a full season
According to Dior Couture, this taboo fashion accessory is back
The old and New Edition cast comes together to perform
Phillies’ Aaron Altherr makes mind-boggling barehanded play
Uber and Lyft are finally available in all of New York State
Disney’s live-action Aladdin finally finds its stars
MIB sets OTT accessibility rules, mandates captions and audio description
Boney Kapoor acquires remake rights of Tamil political satire Thalaivar Thambi Thalaimaiyil
Netflix India names Rekha Rane director of films and series marketing
Zabeen signs off from TV9 after shaping the network’s public voice
Dhawan steps up to bat for Delhi’s grassroots sports push
Orient Beverages pops the fizz with steady Q3 gains and rising profits
Cheekatilo shines in the dark with record debut on Prime Video
-
News Broadcasting5 days agoMukesh Ambani, Larry Fink come together for CNBC-TV18 exclusive
-
I&B Ministry3 months agoIndia steps up fight against digital piracy
-
iWorld1 week agoNetflix celebrates a decade in India with Shah Rukh Khan-narrated tribute film
-
iWorld3 months agoTips Music turns up the heat with Tamil party anthem Mayangiren
-
MAM3 months agoHoABL soars high with dazzling Nagpur sebut
-
iWorld12 months agoBSNL rings in a revival with Rs 4,969 crore revenue
-
MAM5 days agoNielsen launches co-viewing pilot to sharpen TV measurement
-
Film Production1 week agoUFO Moviez rides high on strong Q3 earnings
