Zoozoo!

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Buzz behind Zoozoos – Everyone is talking about Zoozoo these days. Even me for that matter!! And you know what this is creating my friends? Its creating a buzz … a buzz unlike any other in the market these days. People love it, people hate it … but people definitely talk about it. Vodafone has a winner here – or so one might think.

Industry situation – With mobile penetration in India going to touch around 90% by 2014 (thats 1 billion mobile phones!!!), the revenues from simply voice based services are going to trickle down. What were considered to be luxury services on mobiles (missed call alerts, caller ring back tunes, et al) are now considered necessary services. Living in a country which has multiple mobile service provider also means that all these service providers have to invest for customer acquisition. Which means even lesser charges from voice based services.

Jumping the gun – The only way voice based revenues could be increased is to increase the Value Added Services (VAS) part. Before we go any further, What do you mean by VAS?? Don’t worry, even I didn’t know about them a few months back, I worked in an IT firm making solutions for Telecom Operators and I had no clue what they meant by VAS!! Thanks to those beautiful ads, now I do!! But why will people buy these services, how can they buy them if they do not even know what they means?!? Hence the need for awareness for these VAS was recognized by Harit Nagpal (Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone India). Ogilvy was given the charge of creating the buzz for Vodafone.

The Buzz Explained – A good buzz can be dissected to have these elements

  • Clarity of message – Each ad ends with the particular VAS feature. The message is clear.
  • Simplicity – Ogilvy’s Rajiv Rao, in charge of this promotion knew that the entire idea had to be simple and yet stupefying to cut across all ages and convey the idea. All the ads depict this minimalistic approach.
  • Stand out – The egg shaped head; it stands out. The cute shape of those zoozoos; it stands out.
  • Variety – A single idea can also cause a buzz, but over a period of time it dies down, simply because people cannot keep on talking about the same thing again and again. e.g – pink chaddi campaign. You need fodder for people to talk during train journeys!!
  • Right time, Right medium – IPL for TV, Youtube for online.  Zoozoo is everywhere. An nice article by Sushrut Bidwai can be found here.

It’s a great campaign, and I would not be surprised if this turns out to be a case study in a few years. As I finish this post, a question still remains in my head – what will happen if the Zoozoo’s buzz transcends Vodafone VAS and moves on to something totally different (e.g I saw a political ad with the zoozoo theme)?

Wall·E

walle This weekend we decided to catch Wall-E, thanks to my best friend Ashish‘s suggestion. I am not such a great fan of Pixar, I love their culture, but not much of their art … well, that things changed now! I mean, I like animated movies … the effects and all that jazz, but why would you resort to toons … only because you cannot render the same effects in real life? C’mon … give me a break here. Then came a genre of movies which used toons to good effect, and how!! KungFu Panda, Finding Nemo … and now this. This is the coup de grâce of why you should look at animated movies as a serious competitor to other motion pictures.

The movie takes us around 800 years into the future, when the Earth is a lonely desolate planet. It’s a touching love story of two robots, and how they rescue us human from permanent space colonization. A whopping 8.7 guys, do check this movie out.

Some radicals will always rant about AI and the terminator crap, but honestly, each machine has a fail-safe mechanism, and that can have another fail-safe. So why worry? The machine can only be as devious as its creator :-)

PS – Watch the end titles of the movie, the background changes from the initial cave drawings to hieroglyphics to sketches to classic art to renaissance art, so on. History kind of repeats itself, now with machines and humans. Awesome conceptualization.