Written on August 5, 2009

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Jim Millman

Freshen Visa's Promotion of the Olympics and Bring the Cause to Life

One of significant creative problems I faced at Millsport occurred in 1988-89. Our Visa client was starting its planning for its 3rd Olympics, following very successful sponsorship programs for the Calgary Olympics in 1986 and the Seoul Summer Games in 1988. For 4 years, Visa had been running a cause-related card usage program in which money was donated to the US Olympic Team with each consumer purchase on a Visa card. The program worked quite well, but consumer research indicated that by the 3rd Olympics, or years 5-8 of the campaign, it was losing its freshness and that while consumers understood the USOC as a worthy cause, they didn't really understand where the donated money went.

So the challenge was to freshen the promotion and bring the cause to life.

What I came up with was a new way to train Olympic athletes.

The program was called the Visa Gold Medal Athlete Program, and it brought together Olympic hopefuls for a series of Gold Medal Athlete camps to prepare them for the Games. The magic of the idea was that each camp combined 3 training elements that had never been brought together on behalf of the athletes. Each camp featured (1) Motivational support and on-site attendance by gold medalists; (2) Sports Science equipment from the USOC; and (3) the elite coaches in the sport from across the country -- Top coaching, sports science, and gold medalist experience over the course of an intense 3 day camp.

We ran the program in decathlon and skiing, and hit a home run with it. Visa integrated the campaign into all of its Olympic leveraging - sales promotion, TV ads, and PR under the banner of "Pull for the Team" (as in pull out your card)...we even produced 12 vignettes about the program that aired throughout NBC's Olympic Trials coverage, as well as a one hour television special that aired in prime-time on ESPN on the eve of the Trials.( You might remember the famous "ski jumper in a wind tunnel" ad for Visa - that was our sports science element for the winter.)

Perhaps most importantly, the program definitely helped the athletes. Dave Johnson and later Dan O'Brien won medals at the Games, and attributed much of their success to the Visa Gold Medal Athlete Program, and the US Ski Team found equal success in Lillehammer and Albertville. The Gold Medal Program ran for 7 years, encompassing 4 Games - 2 Summer and 2 Winter.