Visa’s activation for Russia 2018 revolves primarily around an influencer led digital and social strategy led by the new football face of the brand Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
The underlying idea behind the campaign was that it would help fight World Cup fans’ FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and with this end in mind the payments partner linked up with Swedish soccer icon Zlatan Ibrahimovic for an activation programme that spanned ads and experiences for fans in Russia and those enjoying the tournament worldwide.
The strategy saw Visa start planning the with its agency partners a year ahead of the tournament.
“With this Fifa World Cup campaign, we aimed to raise awareness of contactless technology and why paying with Visa is the best option when traveling internationally,” explained Lynne Biggar, chief marketing and communications officer.
“Visa’s biggest challenge was breaking into an incredibly sports-heavy conversation with authentic messaging around our efforts with [Ibrahimovic] and contactless payment technology.”
Visa chose current Major League Soccer star and LA Galaxy striker Ibrahimovic because of his global reach, high profile personality and his reach: the former Sweden, Inter, Barca and Manchester United attacker boasts 34.6 million Instagram followers.
The celebrity endorser fronted Visa’s international and host country ad campaigns and helped drive a vast array of creative content through his own channels too.
The global campaign kicked-off in mid April with a ‘Welcome To The Visa Family’ spot starring Zlatan, developed with AMV BBDO London and shot by director group Traktor.
and then campaign evolved with a ‘Press Conference’ commercial on 10 May around a month before Russia 2018 kick-off.
The creative sees the player vow to qualify for the World Cup by himself as Visa takes him to Russia in his own bus atop a gilded throne, while Ibrahimovic proclaims: ‘A FIFA World Cup without me is not worth watching’.
The work is running across all of Visa’s global digital and social platforms,
as well as select local channels too.
The initiative continued to evolve in the lead-up to kick-off and through the tournament itself and was built around an arsenal of more than 20 hero and social films.
There was a ‘Packing’ spot posted on 8 June,
plus a ‘Matchday’ video
and ‘Don’t Miss A Goal’ all posted on the same day,
followed by ‘All Doors Are Open’ won 15 June,
then, on 15 June, a ‘Keepy Uppy clip,
and a semi-final clip on 9 July,
before the 12 July saw Zlatan front a ‘Mission Complete’ social spot.
The objective behind Visa’s sport series creative approach was to ‘deliver video that doesn’t feel like advertising, but feels endemic to the programming’.
“Zlatan is the ultimate personification of FOMO [the main theme of the campaign], so we think he is the absolute perfect person to bring that concept to life ” explained said Chris Curtin, chief brand and innovation marketing officer at World Cup sponsor Visa.
“He brings such charisma and colour to the games. There are so many people around the world that are rooting for him to be a part of it in some way, shape or form. He has a huge following and is a massive celebrity after just a month and a half, he has leapfrogged the normal wrap that a lot of these athletes go through.”
The branded space and event led strand of the activation began as kick-off approached and on the 14 June saw Visa open its ‘Visa Everywhere Lounge’ in central Moscow with a launch event featuring Ibrahimovic and Ekaterina Petelina (the country manager of Visa Russia) and attended by the global media.
The brand team coordinated photography and b-roll to capture content at the event and distribute over global wire and across its social channels too.
The brand also launched an additional lounge for fans and clients in St Petersburg.
“The lounges were home to a number of interactive stations including personalized avatar creation, an AR game, local delicacy tastings, and a self-serve beer station equipped with best-in-class payment technology,” said Biggar.
Another live appearance saw Ibrahimovic take to the stage at the capital’s official ‘Fifa Fan Fest’ and he promoted Visa in front of a crowd of 25,000 people.
While a further parallel phase of Visa’s Russia 2018 activation included exclusive behind-the-scenes rights unavailable to other FIFA partners and, to make maximise value from this content Visa has selected a squad of influencers from across the world to promote the associated assets.
These include freekickerz (Germany), Kotaro Tokuda (Japan), Pamela Allier (Mexico), Chris MD (UK) and Tatiana Vasilieva (Russia) who will all reach audiences and fan segments that Ibrahimovic doesn’t.
These influencers are both integrated into the Visa activation and they will also have free rein of the stadiums to capture and share behind-the-scenes moments.
They boosted the reach of Ibrahimovic’s own 31 million Instagram followers.
The overall campaign spend is weighted to digital/social and while there is some TV and OOH in select markets, it is anchored in digital as Visa both seeks to reach younger demographics and leverages the fact that so much World Cup content will be consumed on multiple, mobile devices.
Much of the creative has been developed globally, but shot in the UK with Endeavor Global Marketing and Starcom Worldwide helping to deliver the campaign.
On 19 July, the brand posted a FOMO film featuring Ibrahimovic inviting six Mexican fans who weren’t able to source tickets to a private box to watch a match.
Interestingly, Visa also developed and used the activation as a research platform: primarily as an opportunity to identify how Russian consumers used Visa’s new contactless payment technology and this the company upgraded thousands of point-of-sale payment terminals in Russia leading up to the World Cup.
As Official Payment Services Partner of FIFA, Visa is leveraging the tournament as ‘an artificial moment in time to showcase the future of payments’.
At Russia 2018, it will support payments at 3,500 point-of-sale terminals and 1,000 mobile concessionaires.
Plus, other strands of its activation will see Visa distribute 6,500 payment rings, 30,000 payment bands and commemorative contactless Visa prepaid cards to fans.
Comment:
As ever, we like the playful nature, bold and yet humorous tone and self awareness of so much Zlatan fronted marketing creative.
His power was further boosted a few months ahead of the tournament when Zlatan was still publicly prevaricating about whether he would come out of international football retirement and make himself available for selection by Sweden for Russia 2018.
Whether this was just a PR tactic to boost his profile as he transferred from Manchester United to MLS side LA Galaxy, or whether it was just to keep his media profile high ahead of his Visa work remains to be seen.
Although Visa claims it was nothing to do with the brand.
“We didn’t orchestrate that. Like the world we were just watching,” assured Curtin.
There are few characters in world football with the force of personality boasted by Zlatan: from his prolific goal scoring to his outlandish (often tongue-in0cheek comments) he has a huge following and a major media profile – little surprise then that Visa has made Zlatan the face of its summer campaign.
And yet the official FIFA partner is better known for a more secure, solid and safe approach to its international marketing – not traits typically associated with Ibrahimović.
But one thing is for sure with Ibrahimović, any brand he works for may not be able to control him but they will be guaranteed plenty of high profile publicity.
His controversial personality has a long track record of showing up at the centre of the spotlight on the biggest soccer stages: it doesn’t seem to matter whether he wins, loses or doesn’t even play.
Consider, for example, his anchor marketing role in Nike’s brilliant ‘Last Game’ campaign around the 2014 World Cup in Brazil (see case study),
or his work for Man Utd wine sponsor Casillero del Diablo (see case study), Volvo (see case study),
or even the UN World Food Programme (see case study).
Russia 2018 was no different.
The official FIFA payments sponsor could be investing as much as £100m-a-year for its global World Cup partnership, but, despite several other big name Western brands stepping away from their FIFA sponsorships for this cycle, Curtis still believes that the tie-up is worth the money.
“These global sports properties remain the last unchallenged bastion of appointment viewing, they have the biggest audiences in the world, the events themselves stand for things that Visa stands for,” argues Curtis/
“A borderless view of the word and bringing the world together. It is unlike anything else, and for a global brand like Visa, that’s why we are attracted to it. It hits every generation, every nationality and both females and males. It is a unique megaphone through which we can tell the Visa story and a unique platform that we can show the best of Visa as a business.”
Results:
Visa’s World Cup campaign generated more than 1,500 articles and media placements around the world: including features in Associated Press, Yahoo, and Hypebeast.
The Ibrahimovic partnership created major social media buzz with videos and GIFs posted to his Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram channels receiving more than 35m views.
Visa used the Everywhere Lounges in Moscow and St. Petersburg to host hundreds of the brand’s clients and thousands of consumers during the World Cup.
The brand also reported that, through research efforts, that contactless payments accounted for 45% of all purchases in the 11 Russian host cities.
Visa’s FIFA World Cup work follows on from its spirit of innovation activation around its other major global sports sponsorships such as the 2018 Winter Olympics (see case study), the 2016 Rio Olympics (see case study), the NFL (see case study), the Super Bowl (see case study), as well as its work around the last World Cup (see case study 1), (case study 2) and (case study 3).
Links:
Visa
https://www.youtube.com/user/visabrand
https://www.instagram.com/visa_us/?hl=en
AMV BBDO London
Russia 2018
https://www.facebook.com/welcome2018
https://twitter.com/welcome_2018
https://www.instagram.com/welcome_2018/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIc3kHv8eeCG6invpMRcCHg/feed
FIFA
https://www.fifa.com/worldcup/
https://www.youtube.com/FIFATV
https://www.instagram.com/fifaworldcup/
https://twitter.com/fifaworldcup
