Financial and Professional Services Team of the Year: Visa
Seed IP’s Kevin Costanza (right) presents the award to Visa’s Jeffrey Yapo
The team tasked with protecting the Visa brand oversees the company’s most valuable asset. Visa started 2017 as the most valuable commercial services brand on the Brand Finance Global 500 and ended the year as the “strongest”. It is also a brand that places the IP team at the forefront of the intersection of brands and new technology.
In addition to protecting the brand and managing its portfolio, the Visa team was praised for its efforts with respect to key business applications, including strategic sponsorships, third-party promotional programmes and global marketing campaigns.
As well as being the exclusive payment services sponsor for the National Football League and a global FIFA partner, Visa is a long-term partner to the Olympic Games. Throughout 2017 it leveraged this relationship, as well as its relationship with key sporting personalities, to further highlight the brand’s position as a payment innovator. For instance, as an extension of its Olympic Winter Games commerce experience, the company unveiled three commercially available, branded wearable payment devices (specifically, payment-enabled gloves, commemorative stickers and Olympic pins).
Visa also used the Olympic Winter Games to introduce a suite of so-called ‘sensory branding’ assets, which use new sound, animation and haptic (vibration) cues to help signify completed transactions in digital and physical retail environments when Visa is used for payments. The ‘sound of Visa’ debuted in the company’s global advertising campaign ahead of the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018.
Elsewhere, Visa proactively participates in the International Anti-counterfeiting Coalition’s RogueBlock programme, which offers a streamlined, simplified procedure for the reporting of online sellers of counterfeit or pirated goods directly to credit card and financial services companies. To date, the programme has terminated over 5,000 individual counterfeiters’ merchant accounts, affecting over 200,000 websites.
In this regard, the Visa team is helping to protect other rights holders, as well as its own brand.
Other nominees:
Allstate Insurance Company
American International Group
BDO Unibank
Citigroup