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Our goal with this campaign was to increase awareness of Visa's sponsorship of NASCAR, and ultimately to generate increased Visa preference among these enthusiasts.
Visa and its agencies put together a promotion for Visa card users that would allow them inside access to NASCAR races, with garage/pit access, a pace lap with Kurt Bush or Rusty Wallace, accommodations in the Visa motor coach including plasma TV and spa usage, and of course tickets to one of 14 races.
AKQA was given the task to find a creative platform that could unify and amplify the scale of this prize. AKQA developed all of the online advertising, the Website visa.com/nascar, and all point-of-sale and collateral materials. AKQA also developed the name for the program, “Ultimate NASCAR Experience.”
We came up with a campaign that could show the consumer the access that Visa could give you with a campaign built around “You are here.” This gave us a scalable creative platform, whether used in an execution that could give you an interactive tour of the prizes, or to highlight a single prize component, like the pace car Eyeblaster did. We conducted a shoot at Daytona right after the Daytona 500 with Rusty and Kurt, the pace car and other on-site locations to build a library for the campaign and Visa’s marketing partners.
As one could expect, the target we wanted to reach, the NASCAR fan with a Visa card, was not very difficult to find. We focused on the low-hanging fruit -- NASCAR.com, ESPN's RPM, Yahoo's NASCAR section and Sportsline.com's Auto Racing. We needed to reach the most enthusiastic of these fans to build association credibility.
Our challenge was to find a way to maximize visibility for Visa's association with NASCAR and to find a way to bridge the association between the two big brands (Visa and NASCAR). We did this by creating prominent fixed positions in key content areas -- seeking out uniquely creative opportunities and purchasing dominant share of voice so that our message could not be missed.
Our buy included fixed/active headers on key sites and in appropriate sections -- including placements that gave Visa credibility based on its association with respected NASCAR personalities. Flexibility was also key, as we wanted to provide impactful creative, which required site cooperation.
Given the long season, we accounted for year-long presence and pulsed around key races. This ensured us season-long presence with additional heightened presence during the key weeks.
The ability to coordinate with Visa’s offline agency BBDO to do a photo shoot over an overlapping schedule helped us to create an efficiency to capture the type of assets needed to create a unique and compelling campaign for Visa and its NASCAR sponsorship. The communication between media and creative allowed for opportunities and ideas that made the campaign even stronger.
-- Glen Sheehan, Creative Director, AKQA; Dianne Hayashi, Media Director, AKQA
