ZooZoos are advertisement characters promoted by

Vodafone India Vodafone India (formerly Vodafone Essar Ltd, Huchison Essar Ltd) was the Indian subsidiary of UK-based Vodafone Group plc and was a provider of telecommunications services in India with its operational head office in Mumbai. As of March 2018, ...

since the Indian Premier League Season 2 (IPL).
ZooZoos are white creatures with ballooned bodies and egg heads who are used to promote various value added services of

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public limited company, plc () is a British Multinational corporation, multinational Telephone company, telecommunications company. Its registered office and Headquarters, global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It ...

. These characters are played by human actors in body suits. The ads were created by

Ogilvy & Mather Ogilvy is a New York City-based British advertising, marketing, and public relations agency. It was founded in 1850 by Edmund Mather as a London-based agency. In 1964, the firm became known as Ogilvy & Mather after merging with a New York City a ...

, the agency handling

advertisements.
The ads were shot by

Bangalore Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...

based Nirvana Films in Cape Town, South Africa.

Prakash Varma Prakash Varma is an Indian filmmaker who has directed and produced many popular advertisement campaigns including the iconic Vodafone Vodafone Group plc () is a British multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and ...

directed the ads. Zoozoo keychains at a stall in Shilparamam Jaatara

History

The ZooZoo idea was conceived by Rajive Rao. He also created the story lines and the name. The ads were shot by Prakash Varma and produced by Nirvana Films within a record time of 10 days. The pre-production work happened within a month and cost around 3 crores Indian Rupees.

Making

, the agency that handles Vodafone advertisements, was asked by Vodafone to create a series of 30 advertisements which could be aired each day during the IPL Season 2. According to Rajiv Rao, National Creative Director of Ogilvy & Mather, they "wanted to make real people look as animated as possible". They employed Bangalore-based Nirvana Films to shoot these ads in Cape Town, South Africa through the Cape Town-based production house, Platypus Productions. The Zoozoos are small-bodied, thin women covered in layers of white fabric. Each facial expression is made of rubber and pasted on the actors to cut down on the time and cost for shoot. The effect was achieved by a variety of methods including choosing the right material for the body suits to ensure that there were no wrinkles when the characters moved, shooting the footage at lower framerates and keeping backgrounds simple in terms of details and the use of a neutral tone of grey. The sets were made larger than life to make the characters look small as the producers could not take children as the schedule of shooting was odd. The Zoozoos were split in two parts - the body and the head. The body was made using a special material stuffed with foam in some places (notably around the stomach) while the head was created using a harder material called

Perspex Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) belongs to a group of materials called engineering plastics. It is a transparent thermoplastic. PMMA is also known as acrylic, acrylic glass, as well as by the trade names and brands Crylux, Plexiglas, Acrylite ...

Public response

The ads were a hit among the Indian audience. This can be gauged from the huge fan following on social networking sites such as

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

Orkut Orkut was a social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service was designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website was named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökt ...

and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

. There are more than 200 pages on ZooZoos having over 250000 fans, growing daily. The ads were also viewed by thousands of people on

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

. Vodafone received the first

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA; , stylized as PeTA) is an American animal rights nonprofit organization based in Norfolk, Virginia, and led by Ingrid Newkirk, its international president. PETA reports that PETA entities have ...

(PETA) 2009 Glitterbox Award, for replacing the

Pug The Pug is a breed of dog originally from China, with physically distinctive features of a wrinkly, short-muzzled face and curled tail. The breed has a fine, glossy coat that comes in a variety of colors, most often light brown (fawn) or blac ...

with more humane alternatives in their ads. RN Podar School, Santa Cruz,

Mumbai Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...

is planning to develop an animated character, inspired by the ZooZoos to attract students and will be used to teach Environmental Studies (EVS) to class I students. Vodafone 3G's Super ZooZoo which was introduced as a symbol of Vodafone 3G launch in India was brought to life using a

Kinect Kinect is a line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB cameras, and infrared projectors and detectors that map depth through either structured light or time of flig ...

and making it dance to

reggae Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, " Do the Reggay" was the first popular song to use ...

References

External links

Official ZooZoos Page

Official Page on Facebook

Making of ZooZoo Ads
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zoozoo Advertising characters Vodafone