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If there are any takeouts from
recently concluded Indian
Premier League Season 2, it is definitely the ZooZoos,
the land of cute white funny creatures who feature in
the Vodafone advertisement commercials. In fact, they
are human beings who were made to wear body suits but
the design of the characters is such that one gets fooled
into thinking it is animation. They are not animated
creatures, but men and women draped in alien suits
and each ad showcases a product or a service offered by
Vodafone. These extraterrestrials were created by Ogilvy and
Mather (O&M) for Vodafone to convey different value-added
services of the mobile phone company. According to
Television Audience Measurement (TAM) figures,
Vodafone, with a share of 12%, is leading the top five commercial
brands that have contributed to 26% of the overall
commercial advertising share in the IPL advertisement
revenue. Today, ZooZoos are the latest craze in the Ad World and
are capturing people's hearts faster.
The first task in any career is to realize what you are good
at. Bangalore-based, Prakash Varma, appeared to be
simple, cool and very much down to earth. And what makes
him different from the usual creative geniuses is the fact that he has
a rare combination of right and left brain mix. He dreams
and follows his guts. At the same time, he seems to be very good
at planning, logic and all sort of the left brain stuff. And he
has got one very rare advantage of his wife who shares the
same spirit, talent and even functions as the producer of his
company `Nirvana films'. When they started out, the idea was
to ensure that no one should be watching cricket only.
Everyone should be talking about ZooZoos and it became a
big challenge to create the practical aspect of how they would
talk, gesticulate and emote. It took three weeks of
pre-production work to understand how it would work. He created
a special world in which all the product stories get told.
A world which is real, yet different; strange, yet
simple; warm and lovable. All the specific product stories
and services get told in this world of ZooZoos, making the
messages more charming.
Prakash Varma came from a middle-class family, where
his parents wanted him to be a salaried, secured and
well-settled employee. But he chose to go ahead with what his
heart said. He had a lot of troubled times, something that
is guaranteed, and just like every magic fable, he finally
emerged victorious. He assisted in the film industry in
Malayalam Feature Films then in advertising as associate to
VK Prakash of Trends Ad Film Makers, worked as Independent Director at
Trends Ad Film Makers, started `Nirvana' with partner
Sneha Iype and created advertising for several renowned brands
in India and overseas. Incredible India's latest campaign being
a feather in the cap, he has several awards in his credit.
He proved the capability of handling a whole
project independently and has supervized an entire team
to bring the best creative solutions as well worked on
leading lifestyle and value brands. And the specialty of
these advertisement series is that it contains no specific
dialogues, adding more humor, understandable by all over
the world, avoiding controversies. |
