Client: VISA
Product: VISA
Title: Urban Survivalist
Media: Starcom
Country: New Zealand
Date Of Campaign: 14/01/2019

Background: Visa wanted people to load Visa on their mobiles and make it their preferred way to pay. By getting our audience to get in the habit of paying with Visa on their mobile, we would future proof Visa against EFTPOS for another generation. We were tasked with growing the percentage of contactless payments made via mobile payments. And to so, without undermining physical credit and debit cards in anyway (as these still are the core of Visa’s business). The brief was to entertain people while showing how easy and convenient Visa mobile payments are. Branded content starring a credible personality gave us an opportunity to both entertain and genuinely connect with our audience to remove their perceived barriers to adopting Visa mobile payments.

Idea: To show how effortless it is to survive everyday life with Visa on your mobile, we created the most successful failed reality show: Urban Survivalist, starring comedian Ronny Chieng. Ronny Chieng (The Daily Show, Crazy Rich Asians, International Student) is one of Australia’s most successful comedians currently working and living in America. The Idea : A reality show with little hope of survival - because Visa mobile payments are just too good.Urban Survivalist appeared to be a new format that stranded a celebrity in the urban jungle with no warning and no wallet to test their survival skills. Knowing our audience loves to watch a reality show ‘train-wreck’ the idea was to make the product - Visa mobile payments – ruin the show entirely. It’s not every day that a product is so good that it ruins its launch campaign, but it did, and did it spectacularly. We turned a typical survival show format on its head and created a pilot unlike any other.Show Synopsis: Urban Survivalist is a new reality show that follows unwilling celebrity, Ronny Chieng. Far from lost in the urban jungle Ronny tries to evade his captors - the hapless reality show crew. Much to the frustration of the director and narrator of the show, Ronny manages to not only survive, but succeed effortlessly because one of the crew forgets to take his mobile phone that’s loaded with his Visa. As everything unravels Ronny proves to be unbeatable while putting the future of the show in jeopardy. A must watch. IMDb rating pending.

Results: Results so far: Did the reality show go to plan? Well, no. Did we create the most successful failure in branded entertainment? Absolutely. At the time of writing, we don’t have all the results to measure against all of our objectives. However, what we have so far is already significant:1.5m viewers spent 12,244 hours engaged with Visa. To put that in context, we drew a bigger audience than Home and Away’s 30th Anniversary special . (Home and Away is one of Australia’s most iconic and longest running TV shows)Viewers were 88% more likely to associate Visa with mobile payments On top of that industry feedback confirms its success. “There is no word on whether there will be more, but we can only hope so” Ad Age.Finally, is Visa thrilled? Yes.