AD - Vodafone 'Busy Message'

AGENCY: Ogilvy, Mumbai

Vodafone has three distinct identities in the ad world today from the perception of a viewer. The dog, The ZooZoos and The Humans. But the one underlying theme of all these distinct assets is the out-of-the box presentation of the ideas. When a new ad of Vodafone airs you look at it with great expectations. And most of the times, these expectations are met or exceeded.

Like in this ad of 'Busy Message'. There are so many different ways that the same message has been conveyed by different telecom providers. But the one that will stand out amongst all those will definitely be this execution.

If there is one characteristic of most of the Vodafone ads, its the fact that the message comes out very clearly at the end of the commercial. This could be attributed to the final tagline but the fun is that after you've seen the tagline you feel as if the entire commercial made so much sense. Watching Vodafone's commercials for the first time you are usually riveted to the screen if nothing else than to find out what the ad will convey and as it ends you usually find yourself smiling thinking that it made perfect sense.

My screen-riveting is usually to see if a new Vodafone ad can outclass the previous one or at least match its execution. There have been few times when I thought that the ads were far fetched but those occasions are few.

This particular ad even rivets my two year old son to the screen. He stops, watches the whole ad, has a smile when he sees the last shot of the Dad sleeping with the baby and then he carries on.

I like this ad for multiple reasons:

• It meets its basic objective in conveying that you can set your own busy message.
• It does that by showing you different scenarios and how each person has set their message.
• It does this in a manner that makes you watch it again and again.
• The people and situations used are normal day to day activities but conveyed in a different manner. You can relate to at least one activity from this, if not all.
• It starts in a 'hatke' manner with a fat guy in a bathtub and then continues with 'regular' people.
• It matches all previous 'human element' commercials of Vodafone.
• It does not disappoint!

I would rate it as 8/10, if only because you expect this from Ogilvy for Vodafone.

As an afterthought, it would be interesting to know how Vodafone decides on which element (dog, zoozoo, human) to take for which message.