How Pizza Hut Indonesia reached Gen Z beyond Iftar with a micro drama

This post is sponsored by DT.

Pizza Hut Indonesia went into Ramadan 2026 wanting Gen Z. The harder question was where to find them. Most QSR media plans land in the same hour around Iftar, and a brand can spend its entire seasonal budget in that window and still be indistinguishable from every other food ad running at that time.

The brand already had reach. What it needed was Gen Z’s attention during the hours its competitors weren’t buying, and more weight and ad spend at Iftar wasn’t the answer.

The team looked instead for hours with less competition for attention, and found them in what it called Ramadan’s odd hours: the stay-at-home afternoons and the late-night Sahur stretch before dawn. Gen Z was watching in both, and few advertisers were there to meet them.

Indonesia downloaded more micro dramas than any other market

Southeast Asia captured 32% of global micro drama downloads in Q1 2026, up 220% year over year, according to Sensor Tower. Indonesia led every market worldwide, with more than 35 million downloads in the quarter. The format is vertical and full-screen, designed to keep viewers coming back for the next episode.

Pizza Hut Indonesia bet big on micro drama, putting its entire in-app budget into the format and buying programmatically across DramaBox, Dramawave, FreeReels, FlickReels, and NetShort through DT Ads in-app supply. YouTube, social, and KOL partnerships ran in parallel to drive broad reach, while micro drama gave Pizza Hut a way to show up during the high-attention hours the campaign was built around.

Pizza Hut’s ads delivered in the hours other advertisers skipped

The purpose-built interactive end card drove an 8.5% engagement rate across the campaign, against an industry benchmark of 4% to 7%. DoubleVerify measured 97.9% viewability through the Sahur graveyard shift.

A DT brand lift study run during the campaign showed ad recall at 63.6% among the exposed audience, compared with 23.8% in the control group, a 39.8-point lift. Purchase intent moved with it, with 37.5% of the exposed group saying they were likely to buy, up 14 points versus control.

Pizza Hut reported transactions up 3.7% year over year and sales up 2.8% across the full campaign season and across all media channels, with gains spread through Ramadan rather than clustering at Iftar.

The campaign won gold for Best Mobile Advertising Strategy at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s Mob-Ex Awards 2026.

Every path into micro drama needs a buy

Pizza Hut never produced its own series, which is the first thing most brands ask about micro drama. Brands have two options: produce their own series, as Grab did with “I fell in love with my Grab driver”, or advertise inside an existing series that already has an audience, as Pizza Hut did. For most teams, the second is the practical route, since it fits an existing media plan and carries no production commitment.

Producing a series does not remove the need for a media buy. Nissan Singapore produced its own micro drama for e-POWER, a wedding-day escape, then ran a teaser from the series as its ad through DT Ads in other micro drama apps, where it achieved a 3.1% click-through rate.

“Brands see how fast micro drama is growing and want to know how to get in,” said Yizhong Aw, senior sales manager, DT.

“Nissan is a good example. They created a micro drama and worked with DT to place the video in front of the specific audiences engaged with that content.”

Micro drama works like OTT and CTV: serialised episodes, on demand, watched by people who choose to be there. The difference is the screen. CTV plans typically buy at the household level, on the living room TV. Micro drama plays on the phone, so a brand reaches one person wherever they are, from mid-afternoon to the Sahur hours before dawn. In APAC, most micro drama viewing happens on mobile, which makes it an easy way to extend an OTT plan.

Pizza Hut Indonesia went looking for Gen Z during the hours its competitors weren’t buying, and it found them in micro dramas. The format has only grown since then, and more brands want to know how to get started and whether they develop their own series or buy into an existing inventory. The question for brands is how to show up in micro dramas.

Talk to DT about putting micro drama in your next media plan.