David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…They're probably the most associated brand other than NBC. But that's only in America. NBC doesn't mean anything around the globe. Visa is the Olympics everywhere. This happens right around the same time as the digitization of point of sale in the cards. It's 1986. The Olympics, for the first time, are going around to companies and offering a global Olympic sponsorship. This is just like the NFL episode. Before this, you could sponsor the Olympics in specific countries. You could sponsor whatever broadcast, whatever television radio was covering the Olympics in certain countries. You could have billboards and whatnot, but you couldn't do a global sponsorship. There's no event like the Olympics that could really do this. Certainly not the Super Bowl, not even the World Cup, you're missing a large part of America. This is the only thing, where you're going to reach everybody in the world. Up until this point, one of the main stay largest Olympic sponsors in America was American Express, because this fits perfectly with American Express. It's for American business people who are traveling abroad. Olympics, great, amazing. The Olympics, the IOC, goes to Amex to try and sign them up to take this marquee global sponsorship slot. They think it's a no-brainer. They give Amex a sweetheart introductory offer deal. You're the first people we're going to, $14 million. Amex declines. They had their bite at the apple, and they missed it. A couple of years before this, right as the Visa empire was being completed with the full digitization of the network, Dee ends up getting ousted from the company. I think if he were still alive today, he would probably agree with the characterization that Dee was one of the most amazing zero-to-one entrepreneurs in history, not so much a one-to-n kind of guy, especially when the industry in which you're going from one-to-n and your shareholders and board is all some of the most conservative financial institutions in the world. A lot of conflict starts to erupt. It ends up with Dee leaving the company in 1984. After this happens, Visa brings on a new global chief marketing officer, a guy named John Bennett who came from 20 years at American Express. He and his team see that Amex has passed on this new amazing global opportunity with the Olympics. They're also formulating the new Visa marketing strategy. Up into that point, the marketing strategy had been mostly generate category awareness for consumers around the world to the extent we competed with anybody, we competed with MasterCard, so we positioned against them. John comes in and he's like, no, no, the path to victory here is not positioning against MasterCard. The path to victory is positioning against American Express. Not because we want to kill American Express, we don't actually care. We're way, way, way bigger than American Express. But we need global ubiquity, adoption, and people to get comfortable with using Visa and using credit cards. American Express, we don't actually care. We're way, way, way bigger than American Express. But we need global ubiquity, adoption, and people to get comfortable with using Visa and using credit cards. Remember, there's still this social stigma that woman in 1993 in Burger King who's like, oh, it's sad if you're using debt to buy a hamburger.…

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