Fido Dido moves beyond the 7UP turf

Fido Dido, the popular brand mascot of PepsiCo’s youth centric flavour brand, 7UP, will no longer be the privileged company of Yana Gupta and Mallika Sherawat alone.

Now, it seems even other ladies can befriend and play with the flirty character, but on their mobile phones. The flat black and white character has now been licensed to Jump Games, an ADAG venture. Fido Dido games are being released on February 1, 2007, across India. They’ll be later released in The US, Europe, South Asia and parts of Middle East as well.

Besides, Fido has also been licensed to a Delhi-based apparel company, Perfect Apparels. So now we all can wear Fido Dido on our T-shirts, jeans and shorts.

The agreement between these two companies and US-based Fido Dido Inc is on royalty, where the latter will get 5-10 per cent of the sales.

Abhishek More, director, Digikore Studios, the merchandising licensing partner of Fido Dido Inc in India, says that the company is looking forward many more such licensing opportunities. “We want Fido to be on bed-cover/sheets, curtain-showers, shoes, or even on stationary products,” he adds.

Besides, Fido will also feature in one-minute animations on MTV and Nickelodeon in the US. The animated movies will also be produced in India.

Talking about the birth of this character, Ferrone says that she along with her artist friend Sue Rose, co-created this character to reflect a common personal philosophy. “We put Fido on T-Shirts with the philosophy written on the back,” she says. These messages were, ‘Fido is against no one’, ‘Fido sees everything’, ‘Fido judges nothing’, ‘Fido is youth’, ‘Fido has no age’, ‘Fido comes from the past’ and ‘Fido is the future’.

What started off as fun turned out to be very good business proposition. “Soon, we started getting business propositions from small shops and boutiques,” she says.

The real fortune came when they were approached by 7UP in 1987-88 to associate Fido Dido with the brand. This animated character was licensed to 7UP for a period of five years for a whopping $ 700,000.

In India, Fido was first introduced as a 7UP mascot in 1990. Later it went missing for a few years and was back with 7UP in 2003.

When asked about the evolution of Fido Dido, Ferrone, who also heads the creative development team at Cartoon Network, says, “He is putting a little bit of colour and has become dimensional from being flat.”

India was the first place where officially Fido put some colour and changed its attire for the 7UP ‘Qawaali’ ad. “The emphasis will now be on making Fido more relatable in future campaigns; maybe not quite presenting him as a magician,” she says.

Ferrone along with Rose is also the creator of other popular characters like Angela Anaconda and Uglydoll.

© 2007 agencyfaqs!