I-Marketing Interview: Visa

Among its online promotional campaigns designed to enhance its brand with consumers, Visa supports an ongoing rewards program that provides discounts and exclusive offers to cardholders through banner and e-mail marketing efforts.

In a bid to spur consumer spending online, Visa is also slated to roll out a major direct-marketing campaign later this year touting its upcoming security outreach program. The initiative, which will enable protected credit-card passwords to become electronic signatures for purchases made via the Web, highlights Visa's expanding suite of e-commerce support services. The San Francisco, California-based company says it currently facilitates more than half of all Internet transactions.

In this interview, Gerry Sweeney, vice president of marketing services for Visa's e-commerce arm, e-Visa, discusses how Internet advertising should not be viewed as an entirely separate channel, but as part of an integrated, overall marketing campaign.

Optimizing Ads

ECT: What advertising advantages does the Internet offer that other media do not provide?

Sweeney: One of the benefits is there are aspects of Internet advertising that are trackable and that have a certain amount of flexibility, so we can change creative messages on the fly. As we look at optimizing our advertising, we can see what is working for us -- and what's not -- and then modify our ad buys and the creative messaging on an ongoing basis throughout a campaign to maximize spending.

ECT: What steps, or series of steps, do you take when planning an online advertising campaign?

Sweeney: In terms of how we plan an online promotional campaign, first we link up our online and offline promotional calendars to make sure we're not competing with each other in the marketplace. We're trying to put a single face and a single voice to our consumer message.

With one of our upcoming promotional campaigns, we're looking at the conversion rates at individual merchant sites that are participating, traffic implications of the campaign, how pre- and post-brand perception is affected, and its latency effects. Then we look at our advertising and media objectives to see how well and effectively we can track against those particular measurements. But at the end of the day, it really is about sales.

Balancing Act

ECT: Should an online advertiser choose many sites on which to advertise - or spend the same amount for a larger buy on one site?

Sweeney: With some of the larger sites you can get broad reach where you attract a lot of eyeballs, but it's kind of a shotgun approach. You can use targeted marketing, in terms of looking at smaller and niche sites, depending on your audience. Generally speaking, we look at a balance between the two.

ECT: What process do you use to determine how much of your overall advertising budget is allocated to a particular site?

Sweeney: We work closely with our advertising and media agencies to do that. We look at our objectives and it's literally decided on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Then the optimization mechanism we have in place allows us to reconfigure that accordingly. As a large advertiser, we also have the opportunity to do some upfront buying and have certain amounts of inventory across all of our initiatives. So that if a piece of real estate or site is not appropriate for a particular campaign, we'll have other messages that are going to be more appropriate.

Tracking Data

Sweeney: There's a lot of data out there but we actually need to access that data, make sure it's analyzed and come to decision based on it. Another basic system challenge we face is identifying e-commerce transactions. For example, with multichannel retailers it's not necessarily evident that a transaction done with a retailer that has a catalog, physical locations and an Internet presence is actually an online transaction versus a phone or physical world one.

ECT: How well suited is the Internet for branding campaigns?

Sweeney: What we've found over time is that the Internet is really a convergence of a direct marketing vehicle as well as a branding tool. It can be effective in enhancing your overall branding efforts, but it's a challenging environment in which to build your brand from scratch.

ECT: How well suited is the Internet for lead generation?

Sweeney: From our perspective, there's not a lot of lead generation that we actually do. That's the business of the bank in terms of card solicitation and acquisition, and many of our issuers are doing a terrific job in soliciting leads.

Tool Time

ECT: What advantages have you gained through running a banner ad campaign?

Sweeney: There are many ways to touch a consumer, and banner campaigns are just one of those elements. We find it a valuable tool as part of an overall campaign, but it's just one part of the mix. We try to maximize our investment in banners by optimizing it and being creative with our media partners as well.

ECT: What advantages have you gained through marketing in e-mail newsletters?

Sweeney: E-mail can be very effective in eliciting consumer response to particular kinds of messages. For promotional campaigns, we've found that it can be useful as consumers opt-in to receive updates for special offers, new promotions and discount savings. E-mail can also be very effective as part of an overall customer relationship tool in terms of retaining that customer over time.

Big Picture

ECT: Have the new larger ad sizes had an impact on your advertising campaigns?

Sweeney: We're working the new larger ad units into our overall media mix and it remains to be seen how that effect is going to take place over the long haul. It's still relatively new and we have to continue to pay a lot of attention to it.

ECT: What pitfalls should an online advertiser try to avoid?

Sweeney: One of the traps that we've clearly seen advertisers fall into is simply relying on click throughs. While it's a metric that has been one of the easier ones to measure, people are looking at it as a black and white situation. Just because a banner might not be pulling in a certain measurement doesn't mean you're not gaining additional benefits, whether that is brand exposure or latent behavior.

Measuring Tape

ECT: Are there any products or services that are not suited for promotion through online advertising?

Sweeney: I don't really know at this point whether you can actually say that. The Internet can be used as a tool for a wide range of product categories. It's an evolving medium and consumers are going to tell us what they're most comfortable with over time.

ECT: How do you measure the effectiveness of your Internet marketing campaign? What factors come into play?

Sweeney: We have three key stakeholders: consumers, the merchants that provide the point-of-sale opportunity, and the banks that actually issue the plastic. We need to look at every stakeholder in the payment value chain to make sure that we're delivering. If, at the end of a promotion, we're not seeing lift, increasing conversion rates, positive brand perception, increased traffic -- or a combination of all of those things -- then we can't really judge it as being successful.

Crystal Ball

ECT: Based on your experience with Web marketing thus far, what does the future hold for online advertising -- both in terms of strategy and technology trends?

Sweeney: I wish I had a crystal ball. I think we'll see different and better metrics available to us potentially at a more reasonable cost. Privacy is going to continue to be a major issue that we'll have to be diligent about.

The thinking that the Internet is not a separate channel, but one more tool that a marketer can use to communicate with their customers, as well as build a relationship with their customers, and an overall consumer brand experience, is going to evolve. Some of the new technologies coming down the road, whether it's broadband or rich media, can actually enhance that brand experience by providing streaming video or some other type of technology, allowing a rich and tangible experience for consumers.

ECT: What advice do you have for a company starting to plan a new online advertising campaign?

Sweeney: It really goes back to the basics: who are you trying to reach, what's the message, what's the call to action? After you clearly define what you want to accomplish, you can then articulate your objectives and build the metrics and measurement tools to evaluate that. The best practices in the physical world absolutely translate into the online world.