
New rules, new ads: Micro-drama platforms say privacy first
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Micro-drama platforms, despite being relatively young in India, are moving away from surveillance-like targeting in favour of consent-driven, contextual advertising to comply with the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023.
While they are structuring brand partnerships around story integrations, sponsorships, and genre-based placements using anonymised insights, they are addressing key challenges—including age-gating, content classification, parental controls, and the moderation of mature themes in short-form narratives—through age verification at onboarding, episode-level content descriptors, parental control tools, and continuous content monitoring. The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) notified the rules and established a four-member data protection board in November, bringing the DPDP Act into effect more than two years after Parliament passed it in 2023.
The Act lays out rules for how organizations in the country can collect, use, store, and process digital personal data, with the aim of protecting individuals’ privacy. “The DPDP Act has essentially formalized what our audience already expects from us: Advertising built around consent and context, not surveillance-style targeting," said Anshita Kulshrestha, founder of digital media company TukTuki Entertainments, which owns a micro-drama platform.
“As a privacy-first, family-friendly micro-drama platform, our brand partnerships are largely contextual and sponsorship-led, with brands owning a slate, show or moment rather than hyper-personalized ads stitched together from third-party data," she added. Kulshrestha said conversations with marketers are shifting from “How granular can you target?" to
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