The tour's concept was inspired by disparate television programming, coverage of the Gulf War, the desensitising effect of mass media, and "morning zoo" radio shows.

[3] As a result, the band earned a reputation for being earnest and serious,[4][5] an image that became a target for derision after their much-maligned 1988 motion picture and companion album Rattle and Hum,[1] which documented their exploration of American roots music.

[15] The juxtaposition of such disparate programming inspired U2 and Achtung Baby co-producer Brian Eno to conceive an "audio-visual show" that would display a rapidly changing mix of live and pre-recorded video on monitors.

The computers' media controls allowed video content from the disc and tape players, either individual frames or entire segments, to be sequenced, looped, and built into pre-programmed cues.

The Edge said, "That was one of the more important decisions we made early on, that we wouldn't sacrifice flexibility, so we designed a system that is both extremely complicated and high-tech but also incredibly simple and hands-on, controlled by human beings ... in that sense, it's still a live performance.

[39][43] The sound engineers decided not to supplement the traditional public address system with delayed speakers for time-alignment, as they wanted the audience to focus their attention on the stage and the multimedia aspects of the show.

[49] The spires of the stage, intended to resemble radio masts,[29] reached as high as 110 feet (34 m), requiring aircraft warning lights approved by the Federal Aviation Administration to be placed on top of them.

[43] The European leg featured confetti cannons, provided by Shell Shock Firework Co. and JEM, that shot "Zoo Ecu" banknotes; these were replaced by "Zooropa" condoms in Ireland.

Originally hired to write the Zoo TV tour programme,[55] he played music inside a Trabant on the B-stage, while providing commentary and wearing a cape and top hat.

[51] It featured footage from Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia,[93] mixed with sounds from Lenin's Favourite Songs, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and voices asking "What do you want?"

[30] For the opening song, "Zoo Station", Bono entered as his primary stage persona, "The Fly", appearing silhouetted against a giant screen of blue and white video noise interwoven with glimpses of photo-copied animations of the band members.

[96] During the first week of the tour, media outlets incorrectly reported that the words shown included "Bomb Japan Now", forcing the band to issue a statement denying the claim.

[103] During "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World", Bono danced with a young female fan from the crowd (a ritual he had done more solemnly on past tours), shared camcorder video filming duties with her, and sprayed champagne.

Performances of "Desire" were accompanied by images of Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, Paul Gascoigne, and Jimmy Swaggart, and were meant as a criticism of greed;[115] cash rained the stage and Bono portrayed Mirror Ball Man as an interpretation of the greedy preacher described in the song's lyrics.

[51] Both songs presented a low-key, introspective conclusion to the show, in contrast to the dynamic, aggressive opening; the group also wanted to move away from its tradition of ending concerts with the fan sing-along favourite "40".

[121] On 11 June 1992, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA appeared on-stage in Stockholm for the first time in years to perform "Dancing Queen" with U2;[122] the song had been frequently covered on the tour up to that point.

[117] Novelist Salman Rushdie joined the band on stage in London's Wembley Stadium on 11 August 1993, despite the death fatwā against the author and the risk of violence arising from his controversial novel The Satanic Verses.

[139] According to Bono, "We came up with a sort of old English Devil, a pop star long past his prime returning regularly from sessions on The Strip in Vegas and regaling anyone who would listen to him at cocktail hour with stories from the good old, bad old days.

[119] Among his targets were the Archbishop of Canterbury, Helmut Kohl, Bénédict Hentsch, the Pope, Alessandra Mussolini, Hans Janmaat, Bernard Tapie, John Gummer, and Jan Henry T.

"[140] A female Cardiff fan who was pulled on-stage questioned Bono's motives for dressing as the devil, prompting the singer to compare his act to the plot of the C. S. Lewis novel The Screwtape Letters.

[145] Flanagan believed that the link-ups accomplished Bono's goal for Zoo TV of "illustrating onstage the obscenity of idly flipping from a war on CNN to rock videos on MTV".

The Asbury Park Press wrote that the long string of Achtung Baby song presentations that opened the show made one forget about the band's past, and that "almost everything you knew about U2 a couple years ago is, in fact, wrong now".

[172] Jon Pareles of The New York Times acknowledged that U2 was trying to break its former earnest image and that they were a "vastly improved band" for being "trendy" and "funny"; yet, he commented, "U2 wants to have its artifice and its sincerity at the same time—no easy thing—and it hasn't yet made the breakthrough that will unite them.

[121] She concluded that the group had "deliver[ed] a brilliant high-wire act" between mocking and exploiting rock music clichés,[121] a comparison also made by stage designer Willie Williams.

"[19] David Fricke of Rolling Stone said that the band had "regained critical and commercial favor by negotiating an inspired balance between rock's cheap thrills and its own sense of moral burden".

"[178] The stadium legs had their detractors, as NME called the shows a "two-hour post-modernist Pot Noodle advert made by politically naive, culturally unaware squares with the help of some cool, arty people".

[165] The incident resulted in tensions within the group during the tour's final weeks as they contemplated whether to reallocate their revenues, which to that point had been split evenly five ways between the band members and McGuinness.

[208] This never materialised, but in 1997, MTV ran a brief miniseries called Zoo-TV, which featured Emergency Broadcast Network extending their tour role in creating contemporary surrealist satirical video.

"[228] Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork wrote in a review of Achtung Baby's 20th anniversary reissue, "Even 20 years on, the tour looks like something to behold, a singularly inventive experience that no band—including U2 itself—has been able to really expound upon in a meaningful way.

"[231] Bob Gendron, writing for the Chicago Tribune, said in 2023 that on the Zoo TV Tour "the band paired the visual spectacle with pointed and prophetic cultural commentary, exploring mass-media saturation, pervasive materialism and, particularly, the increasingly thinning lines between entertainment, news and commerce".