ZooZoos

Why it works

Egg-headed white creatures with balloon bodies and stick-thin limbs gabble in a language nobody understands, giggle and fall in love through tiny comic plots, each one quietly demonstrating a Vodafone mobile service, from phonebook back-up to group texting. Vodafone was a main sponsor of the second Indian Premier League in 2009, and instead of repeating a handful of spots it ran a new film almost every day of the tournament. Animation would have cost ten to fifteen times more, so Ogilvy & Mather India and director Prakash Varma of Nirvana Films shot about 30 films in ten days in Cape Town, casting slight women and children in foam-padded suits and oversizing the props so the characters looked tiny; many viewers took them for cartoons. It is studied as a way of turning dull feature-selling into a serial people looked forward to. Within weeks ZooZoo fan pages had about 300,000 Facebook members, merchandise followed, and the work took an Integrated Grand Prix at Goafest 2010.