Visa Inc. has launched a travel-themed marketing campaign in the U.S. that includes national television ads, a new Facebook application enabling consumers to chronicle their vacations and a sweepstakes via Facebook in which one participant will receive a $100,000 “trip of a lifetime,” the card brand announced May 23.
The Memory Mapper Facebook application uses Google Maps satellite technology and consumers’ photos, videos and captions to enable users to create a visual story of their travels.
The TV and digital-advertising campaign features the real-life Igloi family traveling from California to Tahiti on a surfing adventure. The commercial highlights the Memory Mapper application by using satellite map views of each location the family visits in combination with photos and videos from the trip.
The ads also highlight the Trip of a Lifetime Sweepstakes, which encourages viewers to visit the Visa Facebook page for more information. For the sweepstakes, U.S. Visa cardholders automatically were entered on April 27 and can qualify to win the $100,000 trip through Oct. 31.
The digital ads appear on such social media sites as Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket, and on travel sites such as Orbitz.com. Other online-media channels include DailyCandy and Yahoo.com. By clicking on these digital ads, cardholders can enter to win the sweepstakes and use the Memory Mapper with their social networks.
The next six months represent the peak travel time in the U.S., prompting the desire to use social media with a travel-theme campaign, Alex Craddock, Visa head of North American marketing, tells PaymentsSource.
“Inherently, travel is becoming an increasingly social experience, not just by consumers going online to research and book travel but to read reviews from other consumers,” says Craddock. Often consumers post questions on Facebook or other social-media sites asking friends for recommendations on where to travel, and Visa was looking at how it could harness that inherent social-media experience, he notes.
And connecting consumers with the travel theme can lead to consumers using their Visa cards while they travel, says Craddock. “What’s important for us is really to understand the consumers’ path to transactions and how it’s linked to a purchase occasion,” he says. “In terms of marketing, we look at what we need to do to engage our message and encourage consumers to use their Visa card for their travel transactions.”
More card companies are moving to use social media such as Facebook to drive interest in their brands, but the concept is still in its infancy.
“First and foremost, it’s a contest. So conceptually, it’s not anything different,” says Ron Shevlin, senior analyst at Aite Group. What is different is that Visa is using Facebook as the marketing platform, which improves the execution of the marketing campaign, he says.
“It’s not the effectiveness of using Facebook, it’s the efficiency of using Facebook,” Shevlin says.
Analysts agree that using social media such as Facebook is an important new marketing channel, but they say it remains to be seen what kinds of efforts produce real results that create brand awareness and effectiveness.
“The key thing is that [Facebook and social media] are another media channel,” says Megan Bramlette, director of knowledge management at Auriemma Consulting Group. And card brands, issuers and other marketers are diving deeper into the use of Internet marketing and determining effective ways to use it, she says.
“When Internet marketing first started over 10 years ago, people weren’t applying for credit cards online from day one,” Bramlette explains. “Initially it was used for research and general marketing.”
But then websites got more sophisticated as the consumer psyche changed to become more electronic, she says. “So these cultural changes evolve, and I expect it to evolve with social media,” says Bramlette.
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