Winner 2024

Financial Services

Brand

Visa

Entered by:

Starcom Worldwide

Visa Live At Le Louvre

Credited:

Brut

The Challenge

Visa wants to build relevancy with young Gen Z consumers, so Visa’s ambition has been to meaningfully and authentically become a part of the cultural conversation among Gen Z. Visa has correlated relevance to transactions and payment volume, so making this cultural impact with this group of people is critical for future proofing Visa’s business.

To do this, Visa’s objectives were to:

  1. Drive conversation to become the most talked about brand within their competitive set
  2. Deliver strong engagement with our audience

Drive relevance by getting Visa into the cultural current of Gen Z

The Strategic Solution

To throttle their ambition of becoming part of the conversation among Gen Z, Visa wanted to create a big brand moment leveraging globally-diverse talent Gen Z cares about coupled with the power of creators they look to. This moment became the first-ever concert experience in the Cour Carrée of the iconic Museé du Louvre in Paris called Visa Live At Le Louvre, bringing an electrifying blend of music, art, and culture together like never before.

This included performances from top-tier, globally-relevant artists Post Malone, Ayra Starr, DJ Kungs, and RaiNao that would also be streamed on Roblox.

Our big challenge was to take an event of only 6,000 attendees and amplify its impact and reach on a global scale to drive mass conversation and engagement.

Our research uncovered several insights that informed our approach:

  1. The Taylor Swift Eras Tour Effect: Gen Z consumes event content differently – quick, snackable content based on event moments that are connected to their interests. We saw with the example of Taylor Swift’s global Eras Tour that most engagement moments from the concert were via short clips originating from the relatively small number of concert attendees being microbinged by masses of fans who weren’t able to attend but wanted to engage just as much
  2. Fandoms are more powerful than mainstream: Fan communities have large audiences who are highly engaged with interests beyond just music
  3. Creators are the new reporters: Creators drive authenticity and are who Gen Z want to hear from

The Content Solution

Our big idea was to create a next-generation social media control room model that takes real-time insider content and uses machine learning plus real-time expert decisioning to inform media distribution, amplification and optimization.

The first step in bringing this idea to life was to think about an audience strategy for how we wanted reach members of the global Gen Z/18-34 population most likely to engage with our distributed and amplified content – all without spreading our limited budget too thinly. Armed with our insight around fan communities having far-reaching and engaged audiences, we examined the fanbases of the concert talent. Using the power of social listening and other audience tools at our disposal, we ran audience profiles to determine where in the world fans of these performers are concentrated. From there, we were able to devise an audience of 18-34 year old fans of these artists targeted only to those top 7 markets (United States, Puerto Rico, United Kingdom, France, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico).

Our consumer insight around microbingeing this type of snackable content told us that this behavior was taking place mostly in social channels vs. other digital video channels, so we decided to focus our channel strategy solely on social. We further prioritized our limited budget specifically on Instagram based on existing talent and brand footprint, targetability, and audience reach.

Our distribution strategy was to reach this audience with paid amplification multiplying the impact of this first ever concert event at the Louvre across 3 key phases:

  • Pre Concert: Create awareness and generate excitement among communities & fans with Roblox, artist & creator content
  • During Concert: Create a global pop culture moment making Visa the most talked about brand

Post Concert: Leverage concert content and exclusive artist content to drive sustained engagement post event

The Media/Content Amplification Solution

To execute on our strategy, we combined platform machine learning and real-time expert decisioning to inform media optimization

  • Content: Focused paid distribution to the most efficient and highest engagement organic content aligned to the pre, during, and post concert phases
  • Market: Placements were set up to flex and deliver to the market most likely to have users that engages
  • Platform: On Instagram, we auto-optimized amplified assets based on highest engagement, but maintained flexibility to exploit organic/earned opportunity
  • Handles: Amplified assets via brand, creator, publisher, and even talent Instagram handles, such as Post Malone

Our goal to ensure the best content was being amplified in as timely and informed a manner as possible inspired how we deployed our multi-city social media control room approach. We had people live on the ground at the event in Paris and at the media agency’s office in NYC in constant communication in the days leading up to the concert, during the concert, and after the concert. We had representatives across both locations running point on all facets of this execution from turning around content from the concert for organic posting to legal reviews to reviewing organic performance for deciding which content to amplify to turning on paid media within 5 minutes of those decisions being made.

The Result

To say that our innovative and highly-connected social media control room approach leveled up our power to distribute and amplify our content as well as drive results would be massive understatement.

Our priority media KPI was Engagement Rate, which came back at 2.38% exceeding the benchmark by 8.5x. This translated to 9.3MM engagements (32x more than planned), 81% of which were driven by paid amplification.

We drove the desired talkability as evidenced by Visa’s 47% Share of Conversation amongst direct competitors, which exceeded the benchmark by 3%.

We also saw a +6pt lift in our primary brand metric of Brand Relevance, which exceeded category and client benchmarks by 5x and 3.5x, respectively.

We overdelivered against secondary metrics as well with a 35% 3s View Rate, which exceeding the benchmark by 3.5x and a +22.5pt lift in Ad Recall, which also exceeded category and client benchmarks by 4x and 6x, respectively.