Zoozoos.........

The other day I was watching an IPL match. It was crunch situation for the team batting. Suddenly a wicket fell down. The tension was building up, but these SET Max guys had none of it. Casually they started telecasting the ads, one of their many sources of income. I hate these ads and TV channels when they show up at the 'wrong' time.

The 'stupid' ad started with two kind of animated characters sitting on a bench at a bus stop. One of them reading a newspaper, while other looking here and there. All of a sudden the guy reading newspaper faints and falls off the bench. Another set of characters appear on the screen, keep that fainted guy on a stretcher and take him away. The second guy sitting on the bench picks up the newspaper that is on the ground and reads it and falls down similarly. Screen goes ‘Vodafone red’ with 'Get Stock Alerts on you Vodafone' on the screen.

After that ad had disappeared from my TV screen, I suddenly realised, those characters were cute. They had changed my outlook towards them in 30 seconds. They were not at all stupid. I wish that ad should have lasted for more than 30 seconds.  I had started liking the ad and the cute ‘Zoozoo’s’ in the ad. Since then many new ads appeared after every over of the matches. But gradually I had started liking them. I eagerly waited for a new ad to appear, irrespective of the situation the match was in.

After the match I logged on to Orkut and Facebook. To my surprise, the zoozoos were spoken about all over, be it Orkut world, Facebook or Twitter and not to forget YouTube, which has all the ads uploaded. There were communities on Orkut for the Zoozoos.  I was tempted to follow Zoozoos on twitter.

Vodafone had signed up another set of 'brand ambassadors'. For people like me they are not 'God' as Sachin is, nor do they had a sweet image as that of SRK (but they have already created one), but yet they have created a great impact on the consumers.

Earlier it was the cute and faithful pug, which created all the magic for Vodafone. He used to appear everywhere, write from the hoardings to my Vodafone bill. He was found running everywhere. Now it’s the Zoozoos. Vodafone might have never attracted that amount of traffic on the website. Consumers like me, who used to login to Vodafone.in once in a month to pay our bills, have started logging in daily, jus to check if any new Zoozoo ad has been uploaded.

I received a mail the other day, claiming that those characters are not animated, but are human beings dressed up and made to behave like Zoozoos. I am not sure if this is true, but one thing is for sure, they are doing their 'job' very well. They have created the same Vodafone Impact on the people as the pug. Keep going Zoozoos and we really miss that cute pug. Hope Vodafone comes up with more ads featuring zoozoos and some with that old pug (I miss him a lot).