I’ve never quite understood why Visa and Mastercard bother to do any consumer advertising at all, as card payment processors they’re as business-to-business as you get and surely nobody chooses a payment or credit card on the basis of it being Visa or Mastercard, or anything else. Or am I being thick?
Anyway Visa has been sponsoring the Olympics for 25 years and it’s reminding us of that with this campaign from TBWA Chiat Day which features Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian five times gold-winning Romanian gymnast who scored a ‘perfect ten’ in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.
The elfin Nadia became a global superstar of course and is among the long list of celebs attending this week’s Cannes International Festival of Creativity alongside such as Bill Clinton and former Miracles front man Smokey Robinson.
So does TBWA Chiat Day get a perfect ten for this ad? Hardly, but it does the job for Visa, whatever that may be.
Obviously they feel they have to spend some money on advertising. I’m sure our industry could do with more useless ads too. The problem with this one are the ‘ancient’ video effects they used. Is it that far back or did we have colour TV’s then? The agency just ran out of ideas – ‘wouldn’t it be contemporary to use the same effects that you have on your iPhone on this ad’. How imaginative!