VODAFONE ZOOZOO Ad Campaign

Introduction
In todays world of competition, firms are selling goods and services through a variety of direct and indirect channels. In mass advertising, marketers are exploring new forms of communication, such as experimental, entertainment, and viral marketing. One such innovative idea is Vodafones Zoozoo campaign. Never in the history of Indian advertising we witnessed a campaign that generated so much interest and curiosity among all the segments of the society whether it young or old.. Vodafone is known for its unique advertisement campaign such as pug, happy to help service and latest released Zoozoo advertisement campaign. As Vodafone was a new brand in India, it had a challenging task to develop its own entity and it has done it in a splendid way. Vodafone has benefitted immensely by the zoozoo campaign and it has been proved as a great marketing story. This paper analyzes the marketing strategies used by Vodafone, the efforts that have been put in the making of Zoozoo, and the impact it had on the customers mind It caught the attention and fancy of the consumers, aroused curiosity, told stories and made people retell the story.

About the Zoozoo Campaign

ZooZoos are advertisement characters promoted by Vodafone 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. Although these characters look animated, they are actually humans in Zoozoo costumes. The ads were created by Ogilvy & Mather, the agency handling Vodafone advertisements. The ads were shot by Bangalore based Nirvana Films in Cape Town, South Africa.

Vodafone Profile and Advertising strategy

Vodafone is one of the leading global brands and in brand value ranking and it is ranked as the 11th largest telecommunication company in the world and 2nd in Europe. In the same way Vodafone Essar is one of the leading telecommunication service providers in India. It serves about 35 million customers who are located in different part of the country. It was during the year 2007, an UK-based Vodafone Group took over Hutchison Essar in India and renamed as Vodafone Essar. Hutchison Essar was controlled by Li Ka-Shing who was a Hong Kong billionaire. Vodafone paid $11.1 billion in order to get the 67% stake of Hutchison Essar. The acquisition of Hutchison Essar in India gave Vodafone an access to enter one of the fastest mobile growing markets, where the providers add about six million new connections every month. Total number of Vodafone Essar Subscribers: 127,364,342, i.e. 22.88% of the total 556,683,683 Indian mobile phone subscribers (Table 2). Vodafone is known for its unique advertisement campaign such as pug, happy to help service and latest released Zoozoo advertisement campaign. As Vodafone was a new brand in India, it had a challenging task to develop its own entity. The previous name of this Indian company was associated with a pug. Vodafone decided to come with a new persona for itself, so the people of the country can associate it with the company. The company came with a brilliant persona for itself, which was very apt for it, The Zoozoos. Zoozoos are advertisement characters promoted by Vodafone during 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. Each ad used a story which was enacted by the Zoozoos. These ads though look animated are actually real humans in the Zoozoo costumes. The Zoozoo advertisements were created in South Africa by Ogilvy & Mather, an international advertising, marketing, and public relations agency and Nirvana Films (Bangalore base company) used some animated characters to make these advertisements. Ogilvy & Mather, were asked by Vodafone to create a series of 3D advertisements which could be aired each day during the IPL Season 2. The ZooZoos became very famous and popular at little time. They spent near Rs. 30 million to make these advertisements. Nowadays it is one of the most admirable advertisements in India. The campaign created the buzz both in the traditional media as well as in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and video sharing website, YouTube, for example, it has 2 million members on Face book page which is increasing rapidly. According to Neo@Ogilvy (digital arm of O&M) who is responsible for managing ZooZoos Facebook brand ZooZoo fan page has received around 2.6 million page views in comparison to only 0.5 million of IPLT20.com.

History
The ZooZoo idea was conceived by Rajiv Rao . He is also the mind behind the story lines[1] and the name.[2] 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 rupees.[3][4] [edit]

Making
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 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.[3] Each facial expression is made of rubber and pasted on the actors to cut down on the time and cost for shoot.[1][3] 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.[3]

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.[5]

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, Orkut and Twitter.[6] There are more than 200 pages on ZooZoos having over 250000 fans, growing daily.[7][8] The ads were also viewed by thousands of people on Youtube.[9] 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.[10][11] RN Podar School, Santa Cruz, Mumbai 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 bought to life using a Kinect and making it dance to Reggae. SWOT Analysis Strengths
Vodafone operates in an oligopoly market which is characterized by few sellers and a huge number of buyers. In this market each seller tries to outdo the other through price wars and non- price wars. Here advertisement plays an important role because it is a part of non-price war where a firm tries to outdo its competitors and win it through extensive marketing and advertising strategies to generate mass appeal. Vodafone has been able to penetrate in the market as social networking site and the consumer has accepted it. The most important thing is that Zoozoos are part of a unique and innovative advertisement strategy that gave Vodafone an advantage in the competitive market. Due to all these factors, the campaign has able to penetrate in media as well as social networking sites. Zoozoo is a semi alien semihuman character living in earth-like places which are very simple and expressive. They laugh aloud, cry loud and have a child like simplicity around them so the success of zoozoo is the success of minimalism and simplicity. The zoozoo campaign has been able to generate a lot of curiosity among the viewers. The fan club of zoozoo touched to around 75,000 and various interactive quizzes came up in these days as evident in the wallpapers and screensavers in the cell phones. All these transformed into a great viral marketing event. Another important advantage is that it involves very low cost in the implementation of the zoozoo campaign as compared with the benefits it generated was infinitesimal. There is no

celebrity was required as a brand ambassador which resulted in a dual advantage.

Weakness The advertisements has sometimes creates a feeling of suspicion and weirdness in their minds of the rural viewers where the literacy level is comparatively low. In fact all the advertisements were not very easy to understand because some advertisements have no voice explanations and it is difficult to grasp & understand for the rural people. So clearly the urban & rural population was segmented out & the core target of this advertisement campaign was the educated urban population. The campaign had an undermining effect on the brand Vodafone.

Opportunities
The campaign has been able to break the traditional and conventional ways of advertising through public figures and celebrities. As the advertisements did not make use of celebrities as brand ambassadors, it resulted in savings of huge money. So the use of this concept reduces the cost of service from the part of the company and people may expect to get the service at lower cost. The other companies may also be interested in the success of zoozoo in restructuring their advertisement strategies.

Threats
As a result of increasing popularity of ZooZoo people are more interested in the ads rather than the product. It means that people love to enjoy the ZooZoo ads on television rather than use the product. It can also be said that the brand ZooZoo has become more popular than the brand Vodafone.

CONCLUSION
With the success of Zoozoo, Vodafone India can claim about something that their own. Zoozoo itself has become a phenomenon. The number of Facebook fans of Zoozoo have swelled to 3,07,072 (as on June 17, 2009) far surpassing the number of fans for cricketing and Bollywood icons like Sachin Tendulkar and Amitabh Bachchan, legendary superheroes like Superman and even comic characters like Asterix. The real test of effectiveness of Zoozoo lies in its objective achievement. This campaign didnt generate the sales number to justify the return on the massive investment. This campaign will never create the pull for Vodafone value added services or increase revenue to that extent. These were never the objectives of this campaign, therefore we shouldnt judge the effectiveness based on these parameters. What this campaign set out to do is create some much required buzz around the brand and break the clutter among the frenzy surrounding the IPL. ZooZoo advertisements helped Vodafone increase its customer base by 3.8 % in the 1st quarter of 2010.The reason behind the ZooZoos becoming so famous is its familiarity with the cartoons which people used to watch as kids and invokes pleasant memories and fantastical world people used to live as children. It also does not produce bias of any kind(class, creed, religion etc) and hence this advertising strategy of Vodafone has been able to capture the imagination of millions

across the country. Each age group is interested in the advertisements promoting various 1products of Vodafone and hence it is the most interesting ads on TV now. There is no doubt that the Vodafones ad campaign is a big hit and has become popular with everyone from kids to adult. The ad campaigns has given Vodafone a new look that will go a long way in further improving its brand image. The commercials have hit the Indian market like storm and will now probably go into history as one of the most brilliant advertising idea for the industry. The response by Indian audience is phenomenal. Although experts claim that the ads did not achieve the target of increasing VAS usage. ZooZoos have become a brand in themselves with ZooZoo T-shirts and other accessories being sold at retail chains apart from thousands of visits to their YouTube advertisements and over 2 million fans on Facebook pages. ZooZoo is a great marketing story. Vodafone has benefitted immensely by this campaign. Itcaught the attention and fancy of the consumers, aroused curiosity, told stories and made people retell the story.