Microdramas are on the cusp of something in the U.S. The vertical scripted shorts are at the center of an industry worth tens of billions of dollars in Asia, but their footprint is more nascent in the West, with a foothold closer to $1 billion annually.
But 2025 marked big moves. Traditional Hollywood, after being scared off by Quibi‘s epic failure, is cautiously investing in microdramas–some of them creator-led. At the same time, new independent production companies, most with roots in UGC digital content, are springing up in hopes of riding the next format boom.
Now, microdramas have gone mainstream enough that brands are using them to advertise.
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Crocs is the latest company to commit to microdrama-as-marketing. Its five-part series Charmed to Meet You is a partnership with Creative Artists Agency and ReelShort, the short-form streaming app founded in 2022 by Crazy Maple Studios. It was apparently inspired by the story of a real Crocs employee.
In Charmed to Meet You, that employee is embodied by Lexi, an early-20s single woman who’s facing down Valentine’s Day alone when she notices a pair of plain men’s crocs outside a neighboring door in her apartment building. Her friends encourage her to connect with this mysterious Croc-wearer, so she starts decorating his shoes with the brand’s signature Jibbitz.
We would warn for spoilers, but we think you can see where this is going. And because it’s branded, the love story is a solid throuple: Lexi, her beau, and Crocs.
“Everyone’s kind of gearing up for it,” Alanna Strauss, CAA’s Head of Content and Marketing for its Entertainment Partnerships team, told Variety. “And I think what Crocs is proving is that you can really, truly make it story-led versus just looking at these mediums as ad buys where you run your own content.”
The first 45-second episode of Charmed to Meet You went live across platforms Feb. 13 (appropriate, given the plotline). On YouTube, where the official Crocs channel has 29,000 subscribers, it racked up just 1.2K views. Over on TikTok, with a much stronger following of 3 million, it brought over 20,000 views.
The other four episodes will be between one and two minutes long, and will go live on Crocs’ social accounts in the coming weeks.
Crocs isn’t the first brand to do this. JC Penney did its own five-episode microdrama in 2025, and last week, Procter & Gamble went even further, launching a 55-episode show called The Golden Pear Affair. Like Charmed to Meet You, The Golden Pear Affair is a romance with a plotline that revolves around products–in that case, from P&G’s personal care brand Native.
While we don’t know how these branded dramas will pay off for any of the companies involved, or how microdramas as a medium will end up doing in the West, we do know one thing: they’re moving fast. Think about how long it took brands to embrace advertising on TikTok. Companies waited and watched while creators and production studios took the risk of investing in short-form content, and only put their own money in when things looked peachy.
Now, just a few years later, they’re not waiting.
