Marketers have bought into microdramas — but a lack of ROI might make them irrelevant

Digiday spoke with four marketers who said it’s less about creating a business case around these snackable dramas and more about capturing shopper attention in a fragmented digital ecosystem.

New research from Snap and Ipsos says 42% of daily social media users report watching microdramas (or Short Dramas as Snap labels them) daily. That’s just on social media. Microdramas also live on short-form, vertical video platforms like ReelShort or DramaBox. The trend is chasing video competitors — eMarketer reports microdrama apps are chipping away at mobile engagement once championed by Netflix and Prime Video.

“There’s enough signal to prove that there is demand for this content. There are the views, there are the engagement,” Sean Akaks, co-founder and CEO at SonderCo. “But I think the final loop is, ‘How does this drive business impact?’”

‘Content first, commerce second’

For some brands, it’s a “content first, commerce second” play, said Geneva Wasserman, evp and head of entertainment, IP strategy and financing, at dentsu. Dentsu Entertainment created P&G’s “microsoap” for personal care brand Native with a nontraditional view on performance.

A microseries that drives 500,000 views but receives no earned media is considered a failure, Wasserman said, but a microseries that garners 200,000 views and manages $2 million in earned media and a commerce conversion is considered a win.

“Traditional metrics are misleading. The real north star is: ‘Does the content create cultural credibility that extends beyond the watch,’” Wasserman said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

A social-first approach

Dayna Carney, founder of social-first creative agency Dayna’s House, conceded that direct conversion “isn’t there, per se, exactly,” but “organic storytelling” and community building.

Marketers are tracking things like audience engagement, brand perception, video completion rates, earned media value and content-to-commerce conversion.

Take Bob’s Discount Furniture’s social video series, “Till Decor Do Us Part,” which launched summer 2025. It racked up more than 152 million video views and drove nearly $9 million in attributable sales, per the company. Those results encouraged execs to roll out another season of the series this week.

“That’s a strong signal that we’re building both attention and affinity, which are increasingly important indicators of long-term brand health,” Bob’s CMO, Stephen Nesle said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

Solving for ROI

The question is: will microdramas survive the KPI conundrum?

“Brands really just need to start with showing — not even necessarily that these are driving purchases, but they’re driving even traffic to a website or just encouraging viewers to click and learn more about a brand they might not have heard about before,” said Marisa Jones, analyst at eMarketer.

Brands have already started carving out a portion of ad budgets for microdramas. Per eMarketer, in-app ad revenues for vertical micro-drama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox grew 31% and 29% respectively in Q1 of 2025, reaching $130 million and $120 million. 

The upside is microdramas don’t require the massive budgets that traditional ad spots do, Carney told Digiday. Dayna’s House helped produce Nuuly’s recent social-first microdrama. Nuuly spent a “significant amount” on boosting its microseries on social media. (Carney did not disclose specific production spend figures.)

So while brands have solved the audience attention problem with microdramas, they haven’t solved for ROI. “It’s one of those educated risks where the investment could pay off, and there are signals that it could pay off, but there isn’t clear cut evidence quite yet,” Akaks said.