I love them. All of them. Super creative, brilliant execution, so, so adorable. They are everywhere, and everyone's talking about them. But the point is will you press those numbers that they ask you to and get dating tips, prayer songs, beauty alerts, stock information, etcetera? Or if you are not a Vodafone customer, will you become one, enticed by their array of services?While these cute egg headed white humanoids have of course taken care of the Branding and the buzz, what about the figures? Will this one and a half month long (during the IPL period) campaign make an impact on Vodafone's targets? Given the fact that, Vodafone is already big and known for its creative concepts and branding initiatives, what's the point? More so, at a time like this, When most brand managers everywhere (at least where I am, they are) are freezing ad spends. Maybe this is aggressive marketing after all. Maybe this is what works. But aren't we all discussing how cute these ads are and how smart their advertising guys (O&M) are. What's the ROI, I am thinking.
Dunno. Maybe it's too much to decipher for an obscure copywriter from an obscure advertising agency.
However, Zoozoo xoxo.
I think SIM card sales depend on top of the mind recall and the depth of the distribution channel. A top provider like Hutch cannot afford to spend substantially less on these two counts than its competitors. Now top of the mind recall is achieved through big ticket advertising and below the line advertising. For both, the cost heads are cost of creative and cost of media. How top of the mind recall correlates with media distribution (i.e. channel, and 'prime time') is probably already well established - meaning that Hutch cannot do anything that is substantially different from its competitors. So we are left with creative, and creative stuff probably accounts for a low percentage of total spend on advertising, particularly when the volume is so high. And I think given the kind of animation talent India has these days, the cost of the creative stuff (or more accurately, the constraints on producing good quality creative stuff)has more to do with smart creative people that very expensive (and/or hard to get) animators and technology. Therefore, Hutch probably did a smart thing with the zoozoo XOxos - the message wouldn't drown, they managed to make Rs 6 a minute zodiac stuff cute and visible - awesome I would say
ReplyDelete@UIOW: Maa Kasam....there are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns !!!!
ReplyDeleteDon't know advertsing jargon but to me it looks like the brand ambassador getting bigger than the brand. While one loves Zoozoos and their many antics, brand Vodafone hardly registers itself. The recall value of the ad is the Zoozoo and not the service itself. I would love to know what - if anything - Vidya Balan and Madhavan did for Airtel (at least, did they fare better than their previously and brilliantly executed docu-ads?). But one has to give it to O&M for giving us the adorably wierd humanoids. They'll have a cult following, am sure! :)
ReplyDeleteDiv, the cute dog had successfully established a really good connect with the Hutch brand - i would say their track record is really good - the humanoids might achieve the same
ReplyDeleteConsidering the amount of revenue these nonsense value added service provide to these telecom companies, its no wonder that they invest so much on the ad campaign...in fact the margin in the call is so low nowadays, these VAS are the new savior of telecom companies
ReplyDeleteI don't even remember what stuff the ads sell.
ReplyDeleteI just watch them for entertainment.
Some of them are more entertaining than the boring programs they interrupt.
Only, once you have watched them a couple of times, the law of diminishing returns makes the boring programs seem more entertaining :P