Describe the creative idea

Visa is not inbound travellers’ first-choice payment brand. Therefore, we needed to make Visa stand out amongst our audience. We discovered that these inbound travelers desire a unique travel experience, searching for hidden gems that comprise of local cultural flavors around the city. They strongly rely on user-generated content, such as practical travel guides, viewed on-the-go with their mobile phones. This led us to produce a mobile-driven campaign to target this audience behavior. Utilising Visa’s diverse network of merchants and their exclusive offers, we developed a platform for inbound visitors to discover the kind of unique experience they desire and to accommodate their ‘always on’ behaviour. Introducing ‘Delightful Journey with Visa’, an interactive ad specially designed and illustrated as a digital map for our mainland travellers to discover Hong Kong and Macau’s uniqueness, also featured 50 merchants with Visa exclusive offers.

Describe the execution

We considered a number of potential illustrators to bring a unique art style to the campaign and chose to collaborate with Don Mak, a local illustrator known for his unique style that brings the richly compacted Hong Kong cityscape to life in vibrant colors. For this campaign, Don developed an illustrated map in his signature style. Then we added in local offers and places to experience for users to explore and enjoy. Our ad placements were carefully and specifically chosen to maximize our reach to mainland Chinese travelers. We strategically placed our OOH ad at the Lo Wo MTR station, which sits on the border to mainland China and serves as a primary checkpoint for mainland Chinese visitors coming to Hong Kong. We placed a QR code, which leads to the interactive map, on our OOH ads and POS items so that users may access the map easily. Furthermore, to target online mainland users, we also used geo-location targeting, handy mobile banners and placed sponsored ads on WeChat Moments, a leading social platform popular among our target audience, preparing them to be ready to explore when they travel to Hong Kong or Macau. In Macau, we identified taxis as the best entry point and so we placed our ad, with QR code, onto taxi bodies to quickly increase the campaign awareness and reach. The campaign period began in February and ran throughout Chinese New Year, which is one of the busiest times of the year for Chinese travelers visiting Hong Kong and Macau. The campaign resulted in a click through rate that was 240% higher than the average benchmark.