Credit Basics

FOR 20 years, Visa USA said its credit cards were "everywhere you want to be." But the image of the cards is so fleeting in Visa's new campaign, its first attempt to refashion itself since 1986, that you will need to set your TiVo in slow motion to see them.

That was by design. The new campaign and slogan, Life Takes Visa, aims to elevate the card company from just a purveyor of plain-vanilla plastic. Instead, Visa's newly hired agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day in Playa del Rey, near Los Angeles, hopes to rebrand the company as the payment partner in people's lives.

Using snapshots of universal moments like getting married or learning to dance, Visa hopes to tug at heartstrings as much as purse strings. "Visa is not about buying a tube of toothpaste for X dollars," said Carisa Bianchi, president of TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the Omnicom Group. "It is really about what that smile brings to you. It is all about experiences."

The advertising campaign is the latest example of how financial services companies are playing off emotional ties to their customers rather than the ability to process transactions. The slogan is broad enough to allow Visa to expand into businesses like cellphone payments or to potentially become a public company. It also gives more flexibility to Visa's big member banks, which have been promoting their own brands.

In an interview yesterday, Susanne Lyons, Visa's chief marketing officer, said: "There are not many financial services brands that generate a lot of emotion for people. If you do it right, you can net up your brand message to a somewhat more emotional benefit."

You can also be late. For almost a decade, MasterCard has been emphasizing its emotional touch with the Priceless campaign developed by McCann Erickson Worldwide. American Express, long a client of Ogilvy & Mather, introduced a global brand strategy in 2004. Its My Life, My Card campaign has used celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres to emphasize the overall experience with its prestige brand.

Visa had been contemplating a change for several years, but never took that big step.

In the 20 years that Visa has been using its old slogan, debit cards have quietly overtaken credit card transactions as consumers' preferred payment method. Now, new payment technologies, like using mobile phones, are on the horizon. And a theme that emphasized that Visa cards were accepted "everywhere you want to be" was no longer a great differentiator. Four years ago, the Life Takes Visa tag line was developed by BBDO in New York, which had been the company's chief advertising agency for the past decade.

But while Visa's former brand marketing officer, Becky Saeger, championed the new theme, its chief executive at the time, Carl Pascarella, was not ready for a change, according to two executives close to the advertising strategy.