VISA trims slogan

The campaign will be used worldwide, aimed at various audience

In a world where time-pressed people type "u 2" for "you too", marketing and media phrases are also increasingly being compressed. For instance, commercials for Alka-Seltzer Plus keep the words "Oh, what a relief it is" from their vintage predecessors while eliminating the "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz." The sequels to The Fast and the Furious go by titles like Fast & Furious 6.

Visa has joined the ranks of the reducers by bringing back a theme, "It's everywhere you want to be," featured in campaigns from 1985 to 2006 for the American audience, as "Everywhere you want to be." The theme replaces "More people go with Visa," which ran from 2009 through last year.

Executives at Visa and BBDO Worldwide, its creative agency, say there are more differences between the longer and shorter versions than just a missing word. For example, "Everywhere you want to be" will be used worldwide, they say, in ads aimed at various audience, among them consumers, merchants, financial institutions, governments and Visa employees.

Visa is estimated to spend more than $500 million each year on worldwide advertising. In the US, spending in the first nine months of last year totaled $87.8 million and spending for 2012 totaled $166.6 million, according to the Kantar Media division of WPP.

The new theme is the centrepiece of a campaign that was introduced on 11 January, with a commercial on American television, and will arrive in other countries in coming months. It is the first major work from BBDO since the agency, which lost Visa as a client in 2005, completed winning back the lead creative duties in September, 2012.

According to the executives, the truncation reflects significant shifts in how Visa does business. Whereas "It's everywhere you want to be" boasted that its credit cards were accepted by more merchants than competitors' cards, "Everywhere you want to be" celebrates a multiplicity of options available under the Visa brand umbrella, including mobile and electronic payments.

Under a new chief executive, Charles W Scharf, Visa has been "re-evaluating where we are as a company," says Antonio Lucio, chief brand officer at Visa, California, and has identified "areas where we need to do better" like "getting faster to the market with customer-relevant innovation."

The new theme signals that Visa wants "to become the best way for people to pay everywhere," he adds, with " 'everywhere' relating to things that are important to you." That is underlined in the commercial, featuring an American ski jumper who declares: "This year, women's ski jumping is an Olympic event. Now, women get a chance to fly. I'm Sarah Hendrickson, and this is my everywhere." The social media segment will use the hashtag #everywhere; a sample post for the Visa Facebook page, referring to the Hendrickson spot, reads: "That's her #everywhere. Imagine yours."

The goal, says Andrew Robertson, president and chief executive at BBDO Worldwide in New York, part of the Omnicom Group, was to communicate "the emotional rewards for 'everywhere' " as well as portraying Visa "as the best way to pay and be paid." The new theme does not represent "a reset or a restart," Robertson adds.

David Lubars, chairman at BBDO North America and chief creative officer at BBDO Worldwide, says the agency did not begin its deliberations intent on reviving an old Visa slogan. A brand "always has to be moving forward," Lubars says. "It doesn't mean ignoring your assets, especially if you can make them relevant in a new way" because "a brand is a sum of everything it's been."

In addition to the commercial with Hendrickson, the campaign begins with a focus on the coming Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Although that is not surprising - Visa has been a worldwide Olympic sponsor since 1986 - problems related to issues like security and discrimination threaten to diminish the value of the Winter Games as a marketing tool.

Lucio says: "Every Olympic Games brings with it its own set of challenges. It's still a great global platform. We support the highest ideals of the Olympic movement, which include inclusion."

@New York Times News Service