Visa Europe

What They Asked Us To Do...

Visa Europe is Europe’s leading payment card organisation. The membership association is owned and operated by its 4,500 European member banks and manages the payments network, ensures worldwide interoperability of Visa products and manages the Visa brand. In 2006, there were over 320 million Visa debit, credit and commercial cards. Those cards were used to make purchases and cash withdrawals to the value of over € 1.2 trillion. For every € 9 spent in Europe today, € 1 is spent on a Visa card.

As Visa Europe’s external press office in Germany, Cohn & Wolfe accounts for media relations with business, trade and consumer-oriented media since 2002. In close cooperation with Visa Europe Corporate Communications in London and the German Visa Europe office in Frankfurt, Cohn & Wolfe coordinates and tailors the European one-voice policy according to the German market needs

To increase brand awareness and trust into the Visa brand
To sharpen the profile of Visa Europe as an European payments organisation
To strengthen the reputation of Visa as the market and opinion leader of the payments industry
To launch trend-setting payment products
To keep Visa Europe’s member banks up-to-date

What We Did...

Pro-active communication of upcoming trends with press releases, bylined articles, case and success studies
Agenda-setting with forward-looking topics employing different event formats like press conferences, round tables, interviews and off-the-record conversations
Placement of company representatives as speakers at third-party events
Issues Management to protect the reputation of the Visa brand and the organisation Visa Europe in situations of potential crises, e. g. card fraud, data compromises and investigations by regulators
Reputation management programme to intensify the dialogue with stakeholders from politics, associations and consumer watchdog organisations
Strategic preparation and execution of the main European press conference about the positioning of Visa Europe on the occasion of the announcement of the global restructuring of Visa International in preparation of an IPO
Bank and retailer oriented campaigns to launch new products and technologies, e. g.
- The European debit card V PAY
- The online security technology Verified by Visa
- Visa contactless card technology
Integrated marketing and PR activities to achieve maximum brand awareness among consumers
- "Love Every Day": PR-campaign to foster daily card usage
- Cooperations with leading online media to support Visa promotions

Our Results...

Visa is the opinion leader of the payment card industry in Germany
Cohn & Wolfe has been rewarded with the “PR Agency Award 2006 for Media Relations“ by the client
Continuous increase of the average circulation, averaging 5 million copies per month
Excellent coverage in defined tier-1 business and trade media:
- Percentage of positive articles of total articles: 92 per cent
- Percentage of positive articles of self-initiated articles: 93 per cent
Positioning of Visa Europe: More than 90 per cent of the reporting contained the key messages about the European organisation
Intergrated consumer-oriented “Love Every Day“ PR activities very successful:
- Circulation of more than five million copies (Ad value of more than € 500,000)
- Online media cooperations with more than 14 million page visits and more than 130 million page impressions