The commercial is much too ordinary, given the high standards Vodafone has set with the zoozoos
Er, where did the delightful zoozoos disappear? Vodafone is back with a brand new creature, and this time it’s an animated parrot. For now, I happened to watch just one commercial. The parrot has been used to sell Vodafone’s Rs4 bonus card offering for prepaid consumers.
The talkative parrot plays the role of the owner of a typical Mumbai Irani eatery. The voiceover, not surprisingly, is that of actor Boman Irani, who is a bawaji, and did run an Irani joint at one point in his life. And this renders the parrot pretty true to life. The parrot rants in disbelief that you can’t get a thing on earth for Rs4 in today’s times (the BJP would agree… the beleaguered party has been parroting this issue for a while now).
So the parrot cribs that you can’t get the sali of the sali boti for four bucks. You can’t get the gilli of the gilli danda for four bucks, and that leave alone eat, he wouldn’t even allow you to smell his delightful mawa cakes for four bucks, and so on. Tied in with this cynicism is the Vodafone offer of a bonus card that delivers a laundry list of value-adds for just Rs4.
Yes, it’s an okay commercial. Though Boman’s voice does up the fun ante a bit, the commercial is much too ordinary, given the high standards Vodafone has set with the zoozoos. This sort of stuff we have seen before, in ads and in them movies. I suspect Vodafone managers have decided to leave out the zoozoos this time, possibly because they believe that sort of humour is a little up-market. And the Rs4 scheme is clearly targeted at the lower end of the mobile spectrum, and therefore they needed, what in advertising is famously called, an ‘idiot-proof’ solution.
I actually don’t agree with this thinking. Surely the zoozoos could have been used to speak to the lower-class segment; surely they could have used the creatures in a format that works for that market. That’s what lateral thinking is all about. Having spent millions creating a power brand identity with the zoozoos, it makes little sense to create an all-new property, which will cost both time and money to be established. In fact, Vodafone already uses actor Irfan Khan for cards and schemes targeted at the bottom end, and funnily enough even that route wasn’t utilised here!
Net-net: A needless creation of a new identity. And wastage of some serious investments to nurture it. And the parrot doesn’t even capture the imagination. Tsk, tsk. —Anil Thakraney
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