As a sponsor of the upcoming Olympics games in Nagano, Japan and Sydney, Australia, Visa International [4824Z] is banking on generating wide-reaching media coverage. But Visa is competing not only with other Olympic sponsors vying for media attention, but with the news created by the games themselves.
And, the company's products and services (new payment products and technologies) are ordinarily not headline-grabbing for those outside of the financial services industries.
Determination to leverage its status as a worldwide Olympic sponsor led the company, in part, to create a global art contest in 1994 called "Visa Olympics of the Imagination" (VOI) that invites kids ages 9 to 13 from various countries to submit art with a designated Olympic theme. And the participation of kids in such a contest created a disarmingly non-commercial aura for the company and provide the media with a fresh angle -- local and global -- on Olympic coverage.
And, because a contest progresses through a series of milestones, it has been the perfect vehicle for inviting media coverage at various stages of the campaign, all with fresh media hooks.
In past VOI contests, Visa has, for example, generated media coverage in Le Monde, The Jerusalem Post, Sports Ilustrated, USA Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dallas Morning News on the announcement of the contest; the selection of the winners; an award ceremony and dinner at the Olympic site and when the award-winning young artists return home
Results have been truly Olympian: coverage in more than 1,000 newspapers, print, TV, and radio outlets in more than 50 countries.
"We received approximately 600 million media impressions [covering VOI/Atlanta]," says Michael Sherman, VP, international corporate relations. "That's like getting a story in The Wall Street Journal every day for a year." The contest generated 350 million impressions in conjunction with VOI/Lillehammer two years earlier. (The discrepency between those figures is due to the fact that the summer games are larger than the winter games, and some countries don't participate in winter games.)
The company first launched "Visa Olympics of the Imagination" in 1994, putting word out about the contest in schools (by working with a non-profit international art organization, San Francisco-based Paintbrush Diplomacy, that worked with teachers worldwide to use VOI as part of their art curriculum) and in local newspapers. Twenty-five grand prize winners were selected from the U.S., Canada and Norway and were invited to the Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, to showcase their artwork.
In 1996, 31 grand prize winners from 22 countries on six continents traveled as guests of Visa to the summer games in Atlanta. In 1998, 26 grand prize winners, including four children from the U.S., (and a parent guardian) will travel to theWinter Games in Nagano in 1998.
The current contest has been promoted in the U.S., Canada, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Rim in a variety of ways, including signage in Visa member banks and posters in schools.
Visa International
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In the U.S., Visa will run an insert and application form for the contest in the October issue of Sports Illustrated for Kids. Kids are asked to create artwork "showing a person they admire participating in an Olympic sport, [including] family members, movie stars and political figures." In the U.S., coordinated outreach to 3,500 schools will be conducted by the International Children's Art Museum, (ICAM), a San Francisco-based nonprofit. Some of the coverage for the contest is actually generated on-site, during special events connected to the contest.
"We will also have a past Olympian hosting a ceremonial event the evening of the opening ceremonies," when gold medals will be awarded to the children, says Shannon Riordan, international project manager for VOI in Nagano. "We call it the first medals of the Olympic games."
Local Connections Key
Venturing into a different city every two years requires some on-site PR assistance. During the Atlanta games, Visa worked with the PR firm Ketchum/Atlanta for local expertise in reaching out to the media. Media events included an effort to bring to life the concept depicted in one of the contest winners' artwork. This involved two teams of Olympic athletes, linked arm-in-arm, racing through a 30-foot by 30-foot maze. At the finish line, the Olympians then joined with the 31 contest winners to complete a giant jigsaw puzzle map of the globe.
In Nagano, Visa will work with the Tokyo-based PR firm IRJ, the agency of record for Visa in Tokyo.
Visa execs declined to reveal the cost of running the contest, saying that it was "a budgeted item, and part of Visa's overall Olympic marketing plan."
Serious PR Is Also Kids Play
Running a campaign involving kids requires preparing them and their families to answer questions from the press, as well as running interference with the press if necessary.
"On-site, we provided the kids with a half-day of media training," says Sherman. "We told them, 'Be yourself, be comfortable and be honest. It's okay not to know something.'"
The art contest has garnered results beyond anyone's imagination. Adding the participation of kids into a campaign tends to ensure lots of positive, lively coverage.
"We got 100% positive coverage," he says. "There's never been a negative story, because it's all about kids. And their clean-spirited ideology blends well with what the Olympics are all about." (Carolyn Bretschneider, Michael Sherman, Shannon Riordan, Visa Int'l, 415/432-4185)