Insight
The marketing challenge facing the brand was daunting. The World Cup is the biggest single sporting event in Mexico and the world. Almost all major brands make huge investments to give away trips and other promotions during the Cup. Corona (Mexican beer) even launched “The Largest Promotion in History” (sending 1,000 Mexicans to Brazil!)
In this context, how could Visa break through the massive clutter surrounding the World Cup? And how could the brand do so with a limited budget that allowed only to give away ONE trip to ONE game in the World Cup to only TWO people?
That’s why the brand built this character: a foreign man that won a trip to the Mexico-Brazil match in the FIFA World Cup 2014 but who doesn’t really like soccer and decided to give it to a Mexican fan that proved he really deserved it!
The qualifying round for the Mexican Team was very difficult - the team almost did not make it- and this makes a trip to the World Cup an even more attractive prize. Actually, going to Brazil for the World Cup would be a dream come true.
OMD decided to work this way to break through the massive advertising clutter surrounding the World Cup and help Visa – a sponsor of both the World Cup and the Mexican National Team – to build consumer engagement and brand preference over competitive brands and payment methods.
Strategy
Visa developed the John & Visa campaign. It would be an American who lives in Mexico and won a ticket from Visa to the Brazil World Cup. He wanted to give as a gift this ticket to that Mexican Football Team fan who convinced him he (or she) truly deserved it!
The communication strategy was divided in three stages:
1. Making the character real – to make him credible
2. Build an RP campaign around him and the brand – to make people know him, amplifying the message
3. Generate conversation through the hashtag #aBrasilconJohnYVisa (“To Brazil with John & Visa”) - to make people “convince” him.
Execution
Stage 1 - For this, “he” created the hashtag #aBrasilconJohnYVisa. Those fans who wanted to convince him had to do it through Twitter using this hashtag.
OMD needed to make this character credible and for this it created a content campaign both in off and online press, with the news of this guy who won a trip and wanted to give it away for free. It had unbranded articles talking about the character. Also, “he” recorded “selfie” style videos telling about what he wanted to do.
Stage 2 - Then, the agency conducted interviews with renowned personalities of the media industry in off and online media regarding his intentions. During this interviews Visa started to appear in a more relevant way (the “gringo” mentioned the brand gave him the ticket, as well as the support to make his message available to everyone).
Stage 3 - When the character had been created, OMD wanted to generate conversation around the hashtag, and for this contacted several twit-stars such as Werevertumorro, Sopitas and Facundo who… also wanted to win the trip! By tweeting using the hashtag and inviting their followers (1M+ each!) to also tweet trying to win the trip!
At last, the agency also generated conversation through influencers (10k followers each) requesting the gringo the trip.
Results
The campaign reached one billion social impressions (surpassing the double of the annual goal for Visa MX impressions) in just a month with a low budget (2.5M MXP vs. usual VISA massive promo campaigns +30M MXP). This represents 833% times the total Mexico Population!
The campaign was Trending Topic (TT) twice:
• Mexico City TT on May 6
• National TT on May 12
Additionally, the campaign generated 10,000 organic views in YouTube in just two hours.
Finally, Visa obtained more than 20,000 tweets on the hashtag #ABrasilConJohnYVisa of +10,000 unique users.