Making of ZooZoo’s from Vodafone ad

Hey guys!!!

I hope you are all enjoying the IPL season 2. Thsi season was very interesting. First look at the itineary and I thought that the teams had too many matches in preliminary round.
But, as the tournament progressed, it got really interesting. No one knew till the very last stage about the semi-finalists.

Anyways, if you are following IPL you cannot miss the ZooZoo’s. They are over-weight, white(racist?), stupid, slow moving and very popular character from the Vodafone (Happy to Help) ad campaign.

The ZooZoo ad campaign was specially made for IPL. It features a total of 25 commercials. Each commercial is specifically made to convey a Value Added Service (VAS).

Whats up with so many commercials?
Six months ago, Vodafone briefed its agency, Ogilvy India, to create uncommon characters – a common thread to link the ads in the campaign together. Rajiv Rao, executive creative director, South Asia, Ogilvy India, tells afaqs! that the only starting point for the team was that the character had to be simple to a stupefying level. And thus, the Zoozoo was born.

You Egghead!!
The idea is to tell the VAS stories in a world akin to, yet different, from humans. The creatures were then given a characterisation: they are to lead simple lives, speak a language of their own (something that sounds like gibberish), move in a certain way, and even emote like human beings, with big frowns or big grins to do the trick. The execution is almost like emoticons. “We even limited the number of emotions to be used, to keep things easy,” says Rao from Ogilvy.

A completely Indian concept, Rao lent these characters a name: the Zoozoos. There’s no science to it, he explains – the name just had to be something fun, memorable and catchy, and not a clever one that’s difficult to pronounce.

Ironically, nowhere in the communication does the Zoozoo name pop up, but Rao doesn’t feel that’s much of a problem: it wasn’t a task to popularise the name in the first place.

Some people thought they were aliens and others thought they were animated cartoon characters and some didnt even knwo what to make out of it. I was in a pleasant shock when I read that the the egg shaped white characters (ZooZoo) are not animated. They are actual human beings clad in a costume and fixed with plastic similes for different expression.
If you notice the ad carefully, when they are about to change their face expression, the whole frame changes.

Here is a picture set which will show you how these zoozoo commercials are made:

These guys have a huge fan following. I am a fan as well.
There is a facebook community for zoozoo’s. It has over 40k members and growing.

Youtube is full of zoozoo videos. Here is the playlist URL where you can see all zoozoo commericals aired till date:
ZooZoo Videos

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