SUSANNE LYONS IS PREPARING FOR THE OLYMPICS with a different team this time around. The Winter Games in Torino, Italy will be Lyons’ second Olympics as Visa USA’s chief marketing officer. She took the job just months before Visa’s estimated $250 million push behind the 2004 Summer Games in Athens. This time, the team — and the strategy — are more cohesive.
Visa reorganized its marketing staff in May, tearing down functional silos to form four divisions that set, then execute marketing strategy for a range of products, member banks and target audiences. Visa also reviewed its agency roster, consolidating to 30 or so agencies from around 80 shops (many of them handling one-off projects). Lyons and Senior VP Michael Lynch scoured Visa’s full slate of sponsorships, cutting the Triple Crown and reinvigorating the Olympics, NFL, NASCAR, Disney and Broadway tie-ins with clear business objectives.
It’s paying off. Visa’s estimated $100 million-to-$150 million Winter Olympics push already has 195 member banks and 3,400 merchants on board, an impressive follow-up to the Athens games (with 212 members and 1,900 merchants). Visa introduces blogs to its marketing mix for the first time as the campaign, themed “The Journey,” showcases the personal stories of 15 Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Visa’s “Dollar for the Dream” USOC fundraiser matches consumer donations (up to $2 million); a fourth-quarter promo spurs card use.
“It’s very emotional, the kind of human-interest piece that can really engage people,” Lyons says.
Visa — a marketing co-op serving 14,000 member banks — was ripe for a reorganization as its portfolio expanded beyond the flagship credit card to “payment systems,” including debit cards and small-business accounts. “We’ve gone from being just retail to covering retail and business, and gone from being just one product, credit, to a large number of products,” Lyons says.
Plus, member banks needed better service — longer lead times to access Visa’s off-the-shelf marketing materials and to plan their own overlays and more help with custom-designed campaigns. “The communication links weren’t there with our members, so they could take advantage of things in the same time frame that we were spending a lot of money on TV,” Lyons explains. And there was little coordination internally to sync up heavy TV flights with direct mail, bill stuffers or a sponsorship tie-in. “It made common sense, but the [silo] structure was getting in the way, impeding a natural, organic flow of information,” Lyons says.
Visa broke its 100-member marketing communications staff into two groups that mimic traditional agency structure. The marketing strategy and consulting group, led by Senior VP Jim Tuschetta, acts like 40 account executives, tapping Visa’s marketing resources to serve internal product teams as well as member banks and merchants. “They ask a lot of questions about business objectives, then help create a marketing strategy for that stakeholder,” Lyons says. “This group is now the central coordinator driving our marketing strategy and making sure all the pieces connect.” Tuschetta, a packaged goods veteran, joined Visa in 2003 overseeing branding; Lyons calls Tuschetta “a very good integrator and communicator.”
The strategy team hands off to the 60-member marketing communications group under Senior VP Kellie Krug, which develops creative and work with outside agencies to execute. Krug has been with Visa five years, handling promotions and rewards programs; Lyons praises her as “a really great leader of people, a wonderful collaborator.”
A third division, under Senior VP Kevin Burke, handles advertising, branding and Web marketing. Lyons hired Burke in January; he had been president of J. Walter Thompson’s San Francisco office (which absorbed Tonic 360, the interactive agency Burke founded). “He really understands digital marketing, so the Web marketing group has really expanded,” Lyons says. “He thinks like a business person because he ran his own company, and brings a broader perspective than some people who have a pure advertising background.”
A fourth team, events and sponsorship marketing, is led by Lynch, a 10-year Visa veteran. Its mandate: Turn sponsorships into a platform for Visa’s — and member banks’ — business objectives. The team “changed its mantra to ‘We don’t do sponsorship for sponsorship’s sake,’” Lyons chides. The key: extending rights to members via materials, promotions, athlete appearances “to allow members to take advantage of the rates we’re able to negotiate,” Lyons says.
Witness Visa’s NFL campaign, now underway. There’s the national ad campaign: tongue-in-cheek TV spots show New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady being protected by five linemen, each dressed as a Visa security measure (Zero Liability, Fraud Monitoring, ID Theft Assistance, Verified by Visa and 3-Digit Security Code). There’s the End Zone Dance tour where fans show their touchdown dance and get player trading cards. There’s the national sweepstakes with weekly prizes — 1,000 over the course of the 17-week season. (Cardholders are automatically entered each time they use their Visa credit or debit card. Top prizes: Super Bowl XL trips, game tickets, plasma TVs.) The sweeps tagline “This season, life gets unpredictable” complements the security message that’s the cornerstone of the NFL push.
Member banks get all this, and local players, who visit classrooms to play “financial football” as part of Visa’s ongoing financial literacy campaign (with member banks as partners). “We sponsor a number of individual teams and players, so we really can get that home-team passion and members can use that to connect to their own cardholder base,” Lyons says.
Member banks are keenest to leverage Visa’s Olympics sponsorship. A first-quarter road show gave key banks a first look at materials — including online games and Visa’s first blog — and gave them ample lead time to develop overlays, such as employee events (with athlete appearances), direct mail and P-O-P. Visa’s own staff will handle much of the customized work.
Visa also is negotiating a number of new sponsorships “that we think are better strategic fits,” Lyons adds. “A number of shifts will happen over time.”
Visa cut deals with Walt Disney Co. and Broadway (The League of American Theatres & Producers) a few years ago “because they realized they were sports-heavy,” says Jim Andrews, senior VP-editorial director at sponsorship consultancy IEG, Inc. “They have a really good set up, with a dedicated department. They take sponsorship really seriously and approach it from every angle.”
Stronger sponsorship strategy is just part of Visa’s efforts to tighten integration. Lyons has two goals: Make sure that a business objective informs each campaign, and coordinate disciplines to serve the business objective at each consumer touchpoint.
“It almost felt like: Is Visa out promoting the Olympics? As opposed to the Olympics being a fantastic platform for us to talk about our marketing message,” Lyons explains.
A single-page brief keeps everyone on track. The marketing strategy and consulting group creates each brief, then takes the reins on integration. At the beginning of each year, before budgets are set, the team consults with Visa product managers and member banks, then coordinates with the advertising and sponsorship groups to set a one-page plan for each product and for each key bank. “It’s a really good dashboard strategy for how to attack that particular need in the marketplace,” Lyons explains. The briefs help “make sure what we’re doing is high-priority work that fits the objectives. It helps weed out fun, interesting little projects that people sometimes want to do but don’t have anything to do with the key objectives.”
Marketing staffers use the briefs to set budget, determine marketing mix, and match Visa products and audiences to its three overarching brand attributes: acceptance, convenience and security. Debit cards are obviously convenient, but few consumers understood they are secure, so Visa ran a heavy zero-liability message for its check card for two years “and we really saw the needle move on that,” Lyons says.
“Different products carry one or more of those messages, so hopefully when consumers think about the Visa brand overall, they’ll think: safe, convenient, makes me more powerful,” she explains. (The acceptance message in Visa’s 20-year-old tagline “It’s everywhere you want to be” needs only occasional reinforcement.)
Visa spent $363 million on advertising in 2004, and $172 million for the first half of 2005, including sponsorship-related ads, per TNS Media Intelligence. An estimated $250 million funds sponsorship fees and activities, with another estimated $90 million for additional promotions and direct marketing.
With more products, audiences and messages, Visa keeps experimenting with its media mix. It tested branded entertainment in 2003 as the official card of The Apprentice. “That was a very lucky pick on our part, because at that time it wasn’t the hot show it is now,” Lyons laughs. “We couldn’t measure it well, but we felt we needed to make an investment and try it.”
Ditto on upcoming blogs for the Olympics: “It’s a new channel we’ll begin to learn about and craft our expertise around,” she says.
Other marketing dollars fund highly targeted media, such as street-fair sponsorships to reach Hispanics. Budgets are built bottom-up and top-down: “We look at what we want to do by audience and product, then look at what it would cost — which is always more than you have. Then we look strategically from the top down to see how it breaks by product, audience, media and members to make sure [the whole marketing plan] doesn’t get out of whack.”
Visa brings its agencies to the table early for business briefings and often hosting daylong Q&A sessions with Visa’s senior staff. Krug’s marketing communications group held a “speed-dating day” earlier this year, with 30 agencies presenting to 80 or so Visa staffers — for five minutes each. “People came through with their hair on fire to meet every agency, and the agencies did outrageously clever things to compete for attention,” Lyons laughs.
With the Winter Games only three months away, she’s seeing the Olympics in a different light, too. “Athens was a fire hose of stimulus. Torino is more about understanding how we can really use this to move our business forward,” she says. “The sponsorship team always worked closely with all the marketing groups, but [this time] they tried to get out ahead of it. They made sure the other groups knew what was available, and made the messages all consistent. It feels better coordinated even than it was in the past.”
Brands, Agencies Bust Their Own Silos
Visa isn’t alone in restructuring to improve integration; it isn’t even first. Visa is about six months behind a similar revamp at its lead promotion agency, Arc Worldwide, where “client solutions providers” tap resources across the agency’s five marketing disciplines. (Arc’s longtime account supervisor, Lori Leiva, continues as point person for Visa.)
Visa CMO Susanne Lyons consults regularly with Arc President Marc Landsberg. “Her vision is to get the best people at the table, minimize hand-offs and get the best linkage between strategy and execution,” Landsberg says. “That has immediate implications for how we staff and strategize for Visa. … It’s early days for them, but I think it will change the way we work with their departments and other agencies.”
Landsberg applauds Visa’s five principles, posted everywhere since the reorg to avoid hiccups as staffers switch tasks — and no one knows who’s supposed to put paper in the copy machine now. Credit the crew in the trenches, who mapped out the day-to-day details in the months leading up to the shift.
Landsberg calls the timing of the two revamps “a lucky bounce for us,” but it also points up a growing trend towards structures that favor integration. D.L. Ryan Cos. last month formed Catapult to handle clients’ requests for integrated work; Alcone regrouped after 18 months with separate divisions; and in September, Omnicom Group pooled four of its shops (TracyLocke, TPN, Dieste Harmel & Partners and The Integer Group) to form FreshWorks to handle integrated work for 7-Eleven.
Frito Lay in September promoted veterans Lora DeVuono and Jaya Kumar to group VPs with wider responsibility for marketing, a big step towards tightening integration and revving account-specific marketing. And last month, Hershey Corp. tapped Arnold Worldwide and North Castle Partners for integrated work, with plans for more experiential marketing.
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