Visa Kick’s Off March Madness – Payments Style

Even gurus need good advice from time to time. In fact, Socrates – arguably the original guru – famously noted “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

While that might be an extreme position, the history of successful innovation has not been built by firms that had a single good idea, but by the players who were most successfully able to start strong and then learn, build, innovate and adapt as the world inevitably changed around them.

“Our connected world demands more devices; social media influences everything and new channels for reliable ways to engage customers are constantly evolving. Brands need to get creative to keep up with consumer demand,” wrote Visa’s SVP and Global Head of Digital and Marketing Transformation, Shiv Singh, in a recent blog post.

Singh was announcing the “Everywhere Initiative” – Visa’s newest effort to enlist the startup world for answers to some of its biggest marketing challenges.  Those challenges are focused around three main use cases – Visa Checkout, Visa Signature and marketing to the millennial market.

“I grew up digital and I’m especially excited about the Everywhere Initiative and what we are trying to do,” Singh told MPD CEO Karen Webster in a recent chat before the program’s official kick-off yesterday (March 10).

Singh is not kidding when he notes his digital upbringing – before Visa he was the Head of Digital Marketing for Pepsi. He is also the author of Social Media Marketing For Dummies – a fact that makes him a leading industry expert on how to tap into new media marketing tactics and also amuses his wife to “just no end.”

Singh says that the big brand marketing world today has evolved far afield from the early days of digital, when startups were more a sideshow than a serious consideration.

“In the early days, large brands and their marketing organizations, would ignore startups. They thought they were too special and too fancy to get involved,” Singh reflected.

That changed as it became clear that a lot of technological innovation and marketing sophistication was pouring out of those startups, and brands began realizing that ignorance of those innovations would be to their peril. However, unfamiliar with integrating startups, brands would often run contests  to recruit startup marketers, but without any clear objective in mind.

“To get some of their shininess to weigh onto them,” Singh told Webster, “what a lot of brands started to do was run marketing competitions with startups that were all about ‘Hey show us some cool things, we’ll pick a few winners and we’ll figure out what to do with you.”

While these interactions were interesting and educational, they weren’t really driving value yet.

Now, with the The Everywhere Initiative, Visa is making a third-phase play – looking to find new and outside the box solutions to their big marketing issues, particularly around mobile and digital, which are new frontiers for many consumers and the brands that serve them.

“We are very much in the third phase now where we, as large brands, most definitely believe that the marketing ecosystem has gotten more complex and fragmented than ever, with advertising technologies proliferating and media consumptions fragmenting,” Singh said. “Also, consumers respond differently than they have in the past and we have to look for the best technologies and platforms for reaching the consumer.”

This is not small task, as, Webster noted, small startups often experience a “small clash of culture,” when working with their big brand counterparts.

“Little bit of a clash of cultures is being kind,” Singh responded. “It’s totally a collision. It’s like on the one side we speak French and they speak Mandarin.”

Kidding aside, however, Singh noted that really the multi-tiered and gated process that had companies pitching to them is meant to help mediate those cultural clash challenges. It also helps, he notes, that in the early selection phases Visa is partnering with innovation platform KITE to help select the best of the best among the innovative companies they work with.

“KITE really can serve as the bridge between Visa and [the] startup community,” Singh explained, “which can really help the applicants make their best first impression. They can tell them, ‘Guys this is like a first date — dress well, smell nice and don’t say anything stupid.’”

And, Singh noted, the need to put the best foot forward is not limited to the competing startups alone, as the point of this crowd-sourced approach to innovation is to attract the best-of-the-best talent.

“It’s easy to get a startup who’s struggling to compete in a competition. But the best funded, best planned most sketched out ideas don’t need to compete for anything. So we need to be on our best behavior.”

But what Visa really offers through this competition is access. Often at big brands, Singh noted, projects get launched before disappearing for months at a time into the corporate hierarchy. For the pilots that come through the program, Visa is committed to really giving it the day-to-day attention these types of technological or business solutions need to really make a difference.

Because thinking differently is what the space needs at this point.

Singh noted that this project is looking specifically at marketing, not payments tech itself, which means they don’t necessarily need players with the most locked-down understanding of payments – explaining to Webster that in some cases the more one knows about the payments ecosystem, the harder it is to think outside the box. And, given that Visa operates the biggest payments box in the world, they don’t need help thinking about what’s in the box.

“We have enough people and partners to help us think in the box in exceptional ways,” Singh said.

Instead, what Visa is trying to develop are the ideas that the marketers out there have that no one inside is thinking about yet, but that everyone will be thinking about in a few years.

“They have a pulse on use and user behavior in a way we simply don’t. They know how to target consumers to make them more receptive to communication.”

Though the program was announced yesterday, Visa will begin accepting submissions on March 14.

Visa and KITE will then select finalists who will be invited to present to Visa’s marketing and communications teams. An expert panel of judges will determine the winner(s). The selected winner(s) will each receive $50,000 and will be required to begin the pilot within 30 days.

The games will additionally officially kick-off on March 14 at SXSW, with a small number of innovators being allowed to compete in a “Shark Tank” style pitch competition in the millennials category.

PYMNTS will be following Visa’s “March Madness For Startups” as it picks through the applicants, selects finalists and starts putting into practice the next set of great ideas for reaching the digital and mobile consumer. Stay tuned for more details very soon.