Micro-drama platforms shift to consent-driven advertising

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.

- Lata Jha

While they are structuring brand partnerships around story integrations, sponsorships, and genre-based placements using anonymized insights, they are addressing key challenges like age-gating, and content classification via age verification at onboarding, episode-level content descriptors, and parental control tools, among others.

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.