‘We want people to feel something:’ Why Nuuly is taking a chance on microdramas

Fall can be a great time for brands to get cozy, dig into the archives, reactivate nostalgia, or take over TV screens with a classic campaign.

Not for Nuuly.

The clothing rental company is throwing its own seasonal rulebook out the window, foregoing its typical omnichannel strategy for a fall campaign and instead rolling out a microdrama social series aimed at building brand awareness and emotional connection with consumers, according to Kirsten Henri, the brand’s senior director of creative and content.

The series, called Heart on My Sleeve, is a 12-episode microdrama starring Overcompensating’s Wally Baram as an art teacher looking for love while trying outfits that represent different aspects of her personality. The series will be published on Nuuly’s TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube accounts, dropping in four batches of three episodes each beginning August 19.

Nuuly’s fall push will live entirely on social, with the brand’s marketing team betting that fully embracing a microdrama format will help drive connection with its audience in a way that will feel fresh.

“People are very fatigued of being inundated with brand content,” Henri told us. “We just really want to make an emotional connection. We want people to feel something. We want to feel something, too.”

Straight to the feed

Nuuly’s foray into microdramas comes as the ad industry is paying more attention to the format. Brand interest and participation can vary—grocery store Albertsons recently featured Procter & Gamble’s microdrama Rico’s Tacos on its retail media network and app, for example, while Hollywood-backed projects like Issa Rae’s Screen Time partnered with General Mills for an onscreen Gushers integration.

Branded microdramas generally exist on typical social media platforms and on dedicated microdrama apps like ReelShort, although some have been adapted into television and CTV advertising, creating a big menu of channels for the microdrama-curious advertiser to select from.

In Nuuly’s case, the brand is sticking to putting Heart on My Sleeve on the social platforms where it is already active, partly due to the fact that mainstream social media remains a key way for consumers to learn about brands, Henri said. The team considered diving into microdrama native apps, too, but ultimately decided against it.

To actually make the series, Nuuly worked with Dayna’s House, a social-first creative agency. In all, work on the series ran over the course of approximately four weeks, according to Dayna’s House CEO and founder Dayna Carney. The Nuuly team, director Milky Tran, and Baram collaborated on the script, which follows Baram experiencing various dating scenarios, and Carney told us that she wanted to create “something that feels relatable,” while building in the team’s personal stories.

Product-free zone

Nuuly had identified Baram as talent to work with prior to this campaign, and Henri said the brand came into this project with her already signed on. Carney said Baram’s involvement was the right choice when it comes to engaging with a socially plugged-in audience.

“When it comes to your hero talent… it’s finding [what] we call ‘culty’ celebs, where it’s the celeb that isn’t Oprah, but also isn’t so unknown,” she said, adding that those casting decisions can lend a sort of familiarity to online viewers who might get to know someone through show clips passing through their algorithms. It’s a strategy other brands seem to be employing, too: Mean Girls actress Lacey Chabert fronted Maybelline’s microdrama holiday campaign at the end of last year.

While the celebrities are recognizable, Carney hopes audiences will appreciate that Nuuly’s brand presence throughout Heart on My Sleeve is somewhat subdued, and there’s no huge emphasis on selling a product. It’s an approach she said she believes is key to developing microdramas into an ad format that resonates. Not every brand in the microdrama arena seems to agree: Footwear brand Crocs, for example, has explored making shoppable microdrama series on platforms like TikTok Shop to connect the content closely to purchase opportunities.

Nuuly’s series, in contrast, is entirely focused on providing entertainment and fostering community, or as Henri put it, keeping the brand as a “supporting character” rather than in a starring role.

“Brands have gotten into this habit of performance marketing…[and] it’s really hard to untrain that mindset,” Carney said. “Microdramas aren’t that. They’re not here to [enable] click to buy. You’re not going to get direct metrics off every single piece of content. It’s going to take a lot of learning and training in terms of understanding what this looks like on the other side for brands to be able to invest more in more episodes and to do more.”