Zoozoos - NO ANIMATION

• On first look, these “zoozoos” in Vodafone TV ads for IPL may resemble animated cartoon characters with an alien look or simply a stupid egg-head character with disproportional white bodies and black dots for eyes and mouth.

• These Zoozoo characters, in case you haven’t seen them yet, have been created by O&M for Vodafone to convey different value added services offered by the mobile phone company including phone Backup, cricket alerts, etc.

• There are some 25 such commercials planned under this campaign, 10 of which are already on air. The aim is to release approximately one ad a day, to sustain interest till the end of the IPL. 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.

• Ogilvy experimented with several characters and finally took its love for the term ‘egghead’ one step too far, creating characters that don the colour white (with black dots for eyes and a mouth), have heads resembling eggs, and disproportionately thin bodies.

• 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.

• Vodafone has an IPL microsite for quizzes and contests where one can know the kind of Zoozoo he or she is as each Zoozoo character has a unique set of characteristics and traits allotted to it. Fans may also download wallpapers and screensavers from the Zoozoo microsite.

• It seems that the new Vodafone campaign, which is immensely popular during IPL ad-breaks, would make way for the departure of good old pug ‘Chitika’.

• Making of Zoozoo TV Ads

Here’s a behind the scenes video that shows how these creative Zoozoos were made with human characters and not animation as most of us have assumed.