In a rare instance in which a brand elects to use a Super Bowl spot to showcase a commercial that has already received extensive national airplay, Visa ponied up $2.1 million to air this spot via BBDO starring identical twins Tiki and Ronde Barber.
Its other buy in Super Bowl XXXVI was reserved for an all-new ad featuring rookie NBA phenom Yao Ming, who had made his stateside pro hoops debut just three months earlier.
At the time, the credit card company was busily enlisting sports figures like the 7’ 6” center, the brothers Barber, Derek Jeter, George Steinbrenner and Yogi Berra to flack its Visa Check Card, although by 2004 it had switched gears, aligning instead with endorsers such as Donald Trump.
In airing the two spots, Visa was able to carve out twice the exposure of rival MasterCard and its single 30-second investment; moreover, the Yo-Yao-Yogi ad finished No. 16 on USA Today's annual Ad Meter, not exactly the sort of showing that Ad Meter-obsessed CareerBuilder.com would brag about (see 2007's "Performance Evaluation" for the sad details) but well above MasterCard’s dead-presidents commercial.
BRAND: Visa
YEAR: 2003
AGENCY: BBDO
SUPERBOWL: XXXVI
