Vodafone ads characters ZooZoos

Vodafone ads characters ZooZoos have become a real hit among Facebook, Orkut and Twitter users. 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. These cute white creatures with ballooned bodies and egg heads are used to promote various value added services of Vodafone. Although these characters look animated, they are actually humans in Zoozoo costumes. The idea – the story lines and the name belongs to Rajiv Rao. According to Rajiv Rao, National Creative Director of Ogilvy & Mather, they “wanted to make real people look as animated as possible”. Vodafone received the first People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) 2009 Glitterbox Award, for replacing the Pug with more humane alternatives in their ads.

The ads were shot by Nirvana Films in Cape Town, South Africa. The ads were produced by Nirvana Films within a record time of 10 days. The pre-production work happened within a month and cost around 3 crores rupees. Ogilvy & Mather, 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.

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

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

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