Short dramas (duanju) as a brand channel in China: how foreign brands ride the boom
The short version: duanju — China's vertical mini-series, 60-to-90-second episodes strung into 60-to-100-episode arcs — is a real advertising channel now, not a fad you can wait out. Foreign brands enter it one of two ways: commission a custom branded series, or pay to embed a product into someone else's hit. Both work. Both fail loudly when a brand treats the format like a longer TVC. The winners write for the format's actual grammar — fast, emotional, faintly ridiculous — instead of trying to make it dignified.
A number to set the scale: China's short-drama market hit roughly RMB 50 billion in 2024, which was enough to edge past the country's entire domestic box office that year. By 2025 most estimates put it near or past RMB 100 billion, with well over half the online population watching. When a content format outgrosses cinema in four years, "we'll see if it lasts" is not a strategy. It's a channel, and the media-buying teams already know it.
What duanju actually is (and where it lives)
Forget the word "drama" for a second. Duanju is closer to a slot machine with a plot. Episodes run a minute or two, cliffhanger every time, and the story is unapologetically pulpy — a wronged heiress, a secretly-billionaire husband, a revenge glow-up. You watch the first ten free, then pay coins to unlock the rest, or you watch for free with ads. It is engineered for the scroll, not for taste.
The viewing lives in a few places, and this matters for how you buy in:
- Douyin and Kuaishou — where the format was born; both host in-feed dramas and run their own studios.
- Hongguo (红果) — ByteDance's free, ad-supported duanju app, now one of the biggest dedicated players. If you want reach without a paywall in the way, this is where a lot of it sits.
- Mini-programs and Tencent Video — WeChat mini-program dramas convert straight into commerce, and Tencent hosts longer-form duanju for a slightly older audience.
Same format, different rooms. A skincare brand chasing impulse buys wants Douyin and mini-program commerce; a brand chasing sheer eyeballs looks harder at Hongguo's free tier.
The two ways foreign brands actually enter
Everything a brand does in duanju is a version of one of these two moves. Pick deliberately — they cost differently, fail differently, and buy you different things.
| Model | What it is | Best for | The main risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom branded series (定制剧) | You commission a whole drama built around your product's world — the brand is the premise, not a prop | Category education, launching a hero product, a story only your brand can tell | Expensive, slow, and toxic if the plot is really just a 30-episode ad |
| Product placement (植入) | You pay to embed the product into an existing or in-production hit — the heroine uses your serum, drinks your tea | Fast reach, riding proven momentum, testing the channel cheaply | You don't control the show; a flop or a scandal drags you with it |
The reference case everyone cites is a domestic one, and it's worth knowing precisely because it sets the bar. The skincare brand Han Shu (Kans) ran a run of custom dramas on Douyin in 2023 with the creator Jiang Shiqi (@姜十七) — reportedly around RMB 50 million in, and widely reported to have driven billions of yuan in GMV off tens of billions of views. Whatever the exact attribution, the lesson holds: it worked because the drama was genuinely watchable first and a product vehicle second. The skincare showed up inside a story people wanted to finish.
Foreign brands are already in — mostly on the placement end
You're not the first mover, which is good; someone else paid the tuition. Starbucks made a period-comedy short, "I Opened a Starbucks in Ancient Times," dropping a modern barista into a costume-drama court. KFC ran a time-travel bit that stranded an ancient empress in the present to discover fried chicken. Estée Lauder went the straight-romance route with a Douyin drama built around its lipstick as a love token. Different tones, same underlying bet: buy into the format's native genres rather than importing your global brand film.
Notice what none of them did — none tried to make duanju tasteful. The genre is melodrama. If your brand guardians can't stomach a little camp, placement is the safer entry: you borrow a show's energy without putting your name on the whole thing.
Where foreign brands get it wrong
The failure modes are predictable, and every one of them comes from treating duanju like premium film:
- Writing an ad, calling it a drama. If the product is the plot instead of living inside the plot, viewers bail in episode two. The story has to work with the logo blurred out.
- Fighting the melodrama. Brands sand off the pulp to protect "brand elegance" and end up with something no one finishes. The camp is the product.
- No path to buy. Duanju viewers act on impulse. If there's no in-app store, mini-program, or shoppable link at the emotional peak, you rented attention and threw away the sale.
- Ignoring the compliance layer. Duanju sits under real content rules and periodic crackdowns on vulgar or misleading plots. A foreign brand attached to a series that gets pulled has a problem money can't fix fast.
How I'd test it without betting the year
Duanju rewards nerve, but you can buy nerve on an instalment plan. Start with a placement or two into in-production series in your category — cheap enough to be a test, real enough to read demand. Watch completion rate and whether the product moments drive saves and clicks, not just views. If a placement moves product, then graft on a custom series for your next launch, and only then argue about whether it belongs on Douyin, Hongguo, or a mini-program. That order — placement to learn, custom to scale — keeps the expensive bet downstream of evidence, which is the same discipline I'd apply to any channel. It's the logic behind the cross-border marketing playbook, just pointed at a newer format. And if you're still deciding which short-video home comes first, the Douyin vs Kuaishou question is worth settling before you commission anything.
Bottom line
Duanju is a mainstream channel wearing a disreputable costume — a market that already outgrosses China's box office, watched by most of the country. Foreign brands don't win it by making it classier; they win by respecting its grammar, choosing placement or custom on purpose, and wiring a purchase path to the emotional peak. Treat it as a serious buy in a silly genre, test small before you commit, and it pays. Treat it as a place to run your global film in vertical, and you'll fund someone else's cliffhanger.
If you're weighing a duanju play — or deciding whether it's the right channel for your category at all — that's the kind of call I help brands make. Reach out and we'll pressure-test it.