The trend to rope in popular film stars to promote brands/products may just become a thing of the past. Instead, colourful, humorous and witty animated creations may soon grab the spotlight. We take a look at this rather fresh approach to creating promotional content that may change the way we perceive advertising!

John Kao once observed, "When we add information technology to the mix of creativity and knowledge, we get a particularly potent combination: the capabilities to represent, deploy, and track knowledge, coupled with technologies to promote collaboration across divergent disciplines and perspectives."

The same can be said about Phonethics Mobile Media, a Mumbai-based digital-content-creation company that uses a rich blend of technology and human creativity to bring to life character-led content for commercial distribution, suitable to be aired on the Internet, wirelessly or via any other emerging media. Saurabh Gupta, CEO and founder, Phonethics Mobile Media, affirms: "We are a digital story-telling platform--we understand and convert a brand's theme into innovative content that engages consumers and builds branded digital communities."

The content is in the form of short video, animation and audio clips, a few seconds to a few minutes long--a duration ideal for platforms developed for mobile phones and the Internet.

Caricatures aka brand ambassadors!

Phonethics has a gallery of animated characters, each with distinct personalised content like videos, blogs, etc. The characters are derived from Indian

landscapes and territories, with varied backgrounds and cultures, each with distinct personality traits, and each representing its respective individual vertical.

But how did this idea of creating character-led content germinate? To this, Gupta responds, "We realised that there is lot of content in the market, but there is always a problem of finding it for the consumers or users. Plus, we found there is a huge uptake for western icons such as Spiderman, Superman, etc. Characters have also worked very well for several brands, for example, the Maharaja for Air India, or Fido for 7Up."

The team at Phonethics believes that characters themselves can become visual icons through which users can discover and navigate through the content. That transcends the boundaries of language and cultures, plus helps in accessing the right content as per the users' tastes. Given the convergence of the Web and mobile phone platforms, and the volume of disparate content across destinations, there is a dearth of easily identifiable characters representing specific content verticals. Phonethics is trying to fill this void with its rich and exuberant characters.

"Our character videos have had over 1 lakh views on youtube.com alone, in the past few months," says Gupta emphatically. He further adds, "Being a content-creation company, our innovations generally revolve around animation and videos. In our projects, while using the character of Indiyeah Singh to promote a programme on Star News, we have been able to marry video with animation, and present a successful series based on this character on Star News." Currently, the firm is doing promotions for well-known brands such as Sony TV, Tata Motors, STAR TV, New Zealand tourism, Sony Pix, Cricket Nirvana, etc.