ZEE5 Applicaster
Crafting user-centered experiences at scale
Client · ZEE5
Industry · OTT / Streaming
Team · Himanshu, Omkar, Kaustubh, Sandip, Shruti, Saurabh, Rohit & Advait
My Role · Creative Director, Experience Strategist
Methods · Neuroscience analytics, eye-tracking, biometric response testing
Timeline · 11 months Sept 2019 - Aug 2020
Outcome · 15M → 30M monthly viewers · 45,000+ creative assets · 'Go for BHAG' Award
An 11-month brief at ZEE5 how do we
make 4,620 titles matter
to a generation that scrolls in 1.5 seconds?
We didn't just redesign posters. We redesigned attention.
The Challenge
ZEE5's archive was beloved by Boomers and Gen X but invisible to the Gen Z audience Netflix and Prime Video were already winning. The work had to make the platform youth-relevant without alienating the loyal & legacy viewers who built it and the only way to know what would land was to measure what actually held attention.
A glimpse of the process
We partnered with a neuroscience analytics team to measure what was actually happening when Gen Z encountered ZEE5's existing creative not what they said in focus groups, but what their eyes, brainwaves and biometrics revealed in the first 1.5 seconds of contact.
The insight
The Gen Z attention window for a poster wasn't 8 seconds. It was 1.5. Overdesigned, busy visuals the standard of Indian poster design for two decades were invisible to younger viewers. They scrolled past.
The design response
We moved from promotion to emotion. Single subject, mood-led, Gen Z colour psychology applied across 45,000+ assets, every screen, every touchpoint. Built to stop the thumb mid-scroll.
The impact
Viewership doubled from 15M to 30M monthly viewers over three years
CTRs reached 1.28%, outperforming all prior benchmarks
AVOD → SVOD conversion drove multi-million INR revenue uplift
'Go for BHAG' Award ZEE5's highest internal recognition
Key takeaways
Designing for attention is not the same as designing for aesthetics, neuroscience research gives you evidence the gut cannot.
• A creative north star needs to be bold enough to reposition a brand and specific enough to guide 45,000 assets vagueness at the vision level costs you at the execution level.
• Scaling a creative team requires emotional intelligence as much as design rigour morale under tight campaign turnarounds is a design problem too.
• Systems thinking and aesthetic thinking are not opposites, the best creative transformations build both simultaneously.
View full case study
The Applicaster system continues to evolve. The thinking that powered it, neuroscience-led design, visual restraint, attention as the unit of measurement, now travels with me into service design.
