Why is this work relevant for Entertainment?

Urban Survivalist is a pilot reality show co-written by and starring comedian Ronny Chieng, (The Daily Show, Crazy Rich Asians). He is one of Australia’s most successful comedians now working and living in America. Rather than wait for platforms like Netflix to return our calls, or cause an embarrassing bidding war between rival networks, Urban Survivalist avoided that completely by launching exclusively on the Internet. Ronny was always ready to collaborate to ensure the show became an undisputed success in branded entertainment. “I’m not doing a quote for your dumb show” - Ronny Chieng.

Background

Visa wanted people to load Visa on their mobiles and make it their preferred way to pay. By getting their target to get in the habit of paying with Visa on their mobile, we would future proof Visa against EFTPOS for another generation. The brief was to grow the percentage of contactless payments that are 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). We needed to surprise and entertain people to show them how good Visa mobile payments are. As well as showing the many places you can use them. Branded content was an opportunity to both entertain and genuinely connect with our audience to remove their perceived barriers. Once we turned desire into trial our audience would discover a product that was so good they wouldn’t be able to live without it.

Describe the creative 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. 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. This was an exciting and new place for Visa to be. It’s not every day that a product is so good that it ruins its launch campaign, but it did, and did it spectacularly.

Describe the strategy

Research told us banks had spent a lot of money trying to get people to want to mobile payments -but it had been futile. Research also revealed that growth had stalled in Australia because: 1.People didn’t perceive a need for mobile payments. 2. People didn’t perceive mobile payments as secure. We believed these were simply confirmation bias in action. RFi research* proved that active users of mobile payments aren’t concerned about the security of mobile payments. This meant the job was to go back to basics and create desire to make people want to pay with Visa on their mobile. We needed to break down biases and perception barriers (that didn’t really exist) and show them how good the product is in real life. (*RFi Group Global Digital Banking Council 2018) We had to do something unexpected and surprising for them to take notice and change their perceptions.

Describe the execution

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. The pilot episodes aired exclusively on the Internet and Ronny shared it on his own social channels.

Describe the outcome

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 are still collating data to measure against all of our objectives. However what we do know 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 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.