After 25 years as a
sponsor of the Olympics, coming up with a first can be difficult. But longtime advertiser
Visa is going for that gold in these games with its first
"social-by-design" marketing campaign. It's a fitting strategy, given
the London games have already been dubbed by many as the first social-media
Olympics.
Many brainstorming
sessions and briefings later, the central idea of "Cheer" emerged. As
in everyone cheers for Olympic athletes. This summer many fans will likely be
cheering through social-media channels, the thinking went, so why not organize
the cheering and own it? But, as Mr. Burke conceded, initially "it was a
very young idea."
The challenge Visa faced
was that the emerging platform needed to be about more than just cheering for a
favorite athlete. Visa needed to give people a reason and an incentive to
cheer. So it turned to its own Olympic focus group, the 60 Olympic athletes who
make up Team Visa, including such notables as swimmer Michael Phelps, runner
Lopez Lomong and tennis player Li Na. The athletes told Visa that cheers, in
fact, do make a difference.
Kerri Walsh, a 2004 and
2008 gold medalist in beach volleyball, told Visa marketing executives that
when she's having a particularly tough training day, she turns to her social
network for "inspiration and energy."
And so the cheer platform
-- with the call to action that fans can make a difference -- was born.
"It's the simple filter that all the work had to pass through," Mr.
Burke said. Indeed the theme cuts across all media in the campaign, which will
be Visa's largest Olympic effort to date, running in 70 countries.
The first TV ad narrated
by actor Morgan Freeman, made its debut earlier this month. Called "The
Difference," it features triumphant moments in Olympic history -- from
Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva's record-breaking jump to gymnast Nadia
Comaneci's perfect 10. It ends with video of Mr. Phelps' 100-meter butterfly
win for his seventh gold medal in Beijing. As Mr. Phelps touches the wall just
fingertips ahead of his competitor, Mr. Freeman intones: "When we come
together to cheer, as one [Mr. Freeman chuckles], we know what happens. ...
Join our global cheer."
The Olympic campaign flies
under Visa's "Go World" Olympic theme, maintaining the same visual
style with sepia and gold tones, as well as retaining Mr. Freeman as narrator.
"Go World," launched just before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, has
performed well, resulting in double-digit growth in consumer perception and
return on investment when compared with non-Olympic campaigns, Mr. Burke said.
As part of the online
cheer effort, fans have been asked to upload a text, photo or video cheer
they've created for the athletes. Visa's Facebook page will serve as the global
hub of the collection of consumer-submitted cheers and athletes' responses, as
well as behind-the-scenes videos of the athletes' stories and training. Fans
can also submit "one-click cheers" online or via mobile on social
media including YouTube or through partner sites such as Yahoo and Sports
Illustrated. Over the next several months, Team Visa athletes will also reach
out to their social networks as de facto Visa cheer ambassadors with stories of
how encouragement from fans helps them.
The online cheers,
submitted by fans during a promotion that runs through June 15, will be used
for at least one, and possibly several, congratulatory ads to be run during the
Olympics in Late July and August, Mr. Burke said.
Visa's "social at its
core" approach is prudent, given social media is expected to play a much
bigger part in the London games than it did four years ago. Although Facebook
and Twitter were used at the Beijing games, with just 100 million and 6 million
users, respectively, they were not as mainstream as today. Today, Facebook
counts some 900 million users, while there are more than 100 million users on
Twitter. The two social-media services have also been officially sanctioned and
integrated for the first time by the IOC at the online Olympic Athletes' Hub
where fans can "like" or "follow" a myriad of global
athletes.
Visa isn't the first to
tout the continuing shift to an engagement strategy that emphasizes digital and
social media, rather than traditional media outlets.
"Fewer and fewer
advertisers will start their strategic marketing planning with a television
advertisement in mind," PepsiCo's global head of digital, Shiv Singh,
recently wrote in the Harvard Business Review.
This year's Super Bowl
also put that strategy on display. Coca-Cola's polar bears spanned TV, online
and social media, while Audi let social-media fans "unlock" its TV ad
by completing a puzzle on Facebook days before the big game.
"It's not necessarily
easy to pull this off unless you're a gigantic brand and you're building around
something big like the Olympics," said Marty Weintraub, CEO of integrated
social agency AimClear.
"For years we've seen
consumer brands testing to consumers on places like Facebook and
LinkedIn," Mr. Weintraub added. "The concept of crowdsourcing is not
new. YouTube is littered with half-ass commercials and promotions created
by consumers where the commercial was going to be an ad at the center of a
campaign."
While building out the
campaign from a social strategy is a first for Visa, it's not an experiment but
a sign of things to come. Mr. Burke said, "Will every campaign be social
by design? There's a very good chance of that. But definitely every program
will incorporate a social strategy and that's always a question we'll ask."
Visa will measure the
success of the campaign using several traditional gauges like business metrics
such as transactions, card activations and usage; brand-equity measures such as
awareness and perception; as well as the satisfaction of clients such as its
merchants and banks. Social engagement is the fourth measure, and particularly
important in this campaign. Visa will measure likes, video views, uploads of
cheers and shares to gauge success.
"It started with: How
can we facilitate a global conversation and engage with consumers around the
world in what is truly one of the most celebrated events?" Mr. Burke said.
"We use what we call an "audience-first approach' to our planning and
developing a plan that is social by design is a new direction for us. We
certainly have a global social-media plan, but what the Olympics allows us to
do is to have a global conversation and bring the world together to cheer as
one, whereas often our initiatives are more local or specific to a geography."
[Reprinted from Creativity
Online
article.]
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