2013 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

We breathed life into a traditional (and somewhat restrictive) format by creatively inviting readers to test their travel knowledge. With greater involvement, we effectively improved the amount of time spent engaging with the Visa brand. In fact, time spent with the Visa ad was 9 times greater than with a standard DPS. The Zappar application even increased traffic to the Visa website from smartphones by 560%. Finally, from a business perspective, Visa witnessed a rise in both outbound transactions (up 33%) and volumes (up 30%) – clear evidence we’ve educated travellers on using Visa abroad.

Creative Execution

Like sending postcards or sampling a countries national dish (good or bad!), purchasing souvenirs during a vacation are synonymous with travelling abroad. Therefore, we used souvenirs as the essence of our initiative that challenged people to test their travel knowledge. Using a DPS in key magazine titles, we developed a special print execution featuring 50 ‘peel-off’ tabs. On each tab was a souvenir characterizing a particular City – some tough, some not so tough. The instructions were simple – test your travel knowledge by guessing which city is behind the souvenir. If readers were racking their brains, they could simply peel the tab off to reveal whether they’d guessed correctly or not! We also brought the print execution into the 21st century by incorporating mobile. Readers could download Zappar technology from the DPS and then, using their smartphone, watch Visa’s latest brand TVC come to life from the page.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Despite Visa being universally accepted all over the world, half of people travelling abroad still prefer to use cash and local currency when making transactions. This represents a real barrier for growth to Visa’s cross-border business (i.e UAE cardholders travelling abroad). The problem rests in consumer beliefs regarding Visa usage abroad such as high costs incurred with card transactions. The facts are, Visa takes the hassles out of exchanging currency, giving people more time to enjoy their trip. Well travelled people, often like to impart their knowledge and opinions on travel/geography. Whether its guessing currencies, languages spoken, capital cities or even population sizes, they believe that they are the ultimate ‘culture vultures’. In fact, they gain a considerable amount of enjoyment from being quizzed on their geographic intelligence. Therefore, our idea was to position Visa as the perfect travel companion by giving people a chance to test their travel knowledge!