VISA: “Everywhere you want to be”

Visa is a fascinating business. They are essentially a network that moves money, safely, securely and seamlessly, between consumers, merchants and banks. It is an invisible force that lubricates the global economy.

The problem for Visa is that they are largely invisible and don’t get credit for what they do. Somewhat ironically, the better they do their job of making payments more seamless and easier than ever before, thanks to new technologies like tap and pay, the more invisible they become.

The role for communications is to keep Visa salient and show the value they bring to their customers’ (the banks) customers (the likes of you and me). In truth, it is B-to-B advertising masquerading as B-to-C advertising. By making Visa valuable and relevant to consumers, it gave Visa a compelling story to convince the banks to offer Visa over American Express or Mastercard.

One of the brand’s greatest equities at the time I worked on the business was their tagline, “Everywhere you want to be”. However, this idea had started to lose relevance as card acceptance was no longer the competitive advantage it once was. That said, it was such a strong equity that we felt we could not just allow to wither away. Instead, we decided to lean into the category truth that when money moves, it moves more than financial capital and enables social and economic mobility. For example, the Uber driver who works nights after a part time day job may be driven by the desire to buy his daughter a new prom dress or rent a slightly nicer apartment for his family. It all starts with the movement of money, but that is just the start of the story.

We asked a simple question in the advertising, “where do you want to be?” and then showed how Visa enabled that end. It was a simple creative construct that we started to deploy globally.

Sadly, we had a wonderful campaign lined up for the 2020 Olympics in 2020 which would have showcased our new expression of “Everywhere you want to be”, but the pandemic scuppered that plan. The last meeting I had before the world closed down was with the Global CEO of Visa to present the Olympics work. He said, it was the best work BBDO had done for Visa, but the films were never aired. Disappointing, but here are a couple of executions from the “where do you want to be” campaign that preceded the Olympics.