'Speed of refresh critical in popularity of Zoozoos': OgilvyOne

Google India made its intentions clear of a richer engagement with the Indian advertising industry during the 'Thing Digital' conference, a knowledge sharing event in Mumbai that invited select agencies to present award winning case studies that won at Goafest 2010’s Creative Abbys in the Interactive and Digital category.

The search engine giant already runs Google Agency Academy, an eight-week certificate course for advertising and media agencies and it is currently involved in giving shape to Google Creative Signbox, an industry event that it says agency professionals must look forward to, later this month.

On Friday, the Think Digital conference saw OgilvyOne, Experience Commerce, Publicis India, Publicis Ambience and Tribal DDB present case studies.

Speakers from these agencies also shared learnings derived while working on these cases. This was puncutated with interesting nuggets on their campaigns. For example, OgilvyOne vice president Harshad Hardikar and associate creative director Vinay Venkatesh had this to say of the Vodafone Zoozoos digital campaign: "The term Zoozoo was made first made public on social media. Even internally within the agency, we were sure of the Zoozoos being a pathbreaking campaign and this made us work harder on making it a success."

Hardikar said, “The core of every social media campaign’s strategy is to make it engaging. The 'Navrasas' have a role to play in defining the origins of any such campaign. For example, the Pink Chaddi campaign was born out of anger. So was the Shashi Tharoor support group. Similarly, humour is something that makes virals travel on the web. And fear makes us forward mails – the ones which state that something godforsaken will happen to us if we do not forward it!”

OgilvyOne did a variety of activities on Facebook to create engagement with the Zoozoos – right from uploading the making of the TVCs, to developing 'Tag Me' applications, puzzles, dodgeball games, caption contests, polls. Hardikar said, "The speed of refresh of content posted was a very critical factor in the success of the Zoozoos."

Sandip Maiti, CEO, Experience Commerce who presented a case study on Mitsubishi Cedia’s The Great Driving Challenge, a campaign for a “car that was meant to be driven by the owners, not the chauffers”. "More than 10,000 couples signed in and the quality of user generated content (UGC) was phenomenal. The participation of women ensured that the campaign travelled online to offline and therefore managed to get more people involved. It completely debunked the myth that internet was for young audiences alone. Having said that, it was a case study in managing the crowds online. And with a bounce rate of a mere 5% - a number which is clearly eye-popping - it was proof that the execution of the microsite was very good." (View the case study here.)

Emmanuel Upputuru, national creative director, Publicis India presented a case study on Maggi – part of a consumer campaign on the brand’s 25 years in India. "As a product, Maggi is targeted at mothers. But today, these are the same mothers who’ve spent a lifetime with Maggi and their experience with the brand was reason enough for them to write to us with their stories. Thousands of stories were received during the campaign."

Ashish Khazanchi, vice chairman and national creative director, Publicis Ambience shared the Happy December case study, a viral campaign executed in the month of December on the Campaign India website. "We created about 22 films in a very short period of time that reflected all the madness that takes place in agencies when the award season is on the anvil. We made them on minimal resources and they were very well received in the advertising community." (Watch the Happy December films here.)

Tribal DDB was the final agency to present at the conference and it shared details of Reliance GSM’s 'Go For It' campaign executed digitally, which allowed users to make a 2-minute phone call to any cellphone number of their choice. The agency also shared nuggets from the 'Mumbai Smiles' case study for Wrigley's Orbit, which was the first time the agency attempted a social media campaign.