>According to the U.S. Sponsorship Tracker, a Visa commissioned study following the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games conducted by Performance Research

When a company is paying for research about its own decisions, the research always comes back that the decision was wonderful, or that research firm doesn't get hired again.

>or that research firm doesn't get hired again.

This is the key part. Research funded by biased parties can produce valid research and results. There is the case of the physicist that was skeptical of global warming that was funded by the Koch brothers to study global warming. As a scientist, at a well known college for physics, he was skeptical but not blinded by money/politics. His research changed is mind completely.

But, like you said, he won't be hired again by two brothers that are wealthily through oil.

Out of curiousity, do you have a link to the study or a writeup? I'd love to read it.

Koch-funded climate change skeptic reverses course:

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-kochfunded-climat...

Thank you. I was have a really hard time finding a link I felt was credible. I only know if it from seeing an interview on TV.

Wouldn't they just be able to look at their own records to see any trends (or lack thereof)? Presumably Visa is investing multi-millions of dollars of into this, surely they expect to see a return on that investment. If the fail to see that return, surely they would stop. They haven't stopped. I'm thinking that the research firm was probably right.

Visa is not a person. The person who sponsored that campaign probably prioritizes his career over the RoI of the company.

I doubt it was one person who decided, negotiated and implemented the sponsoring of this campaign. So what is your point? Does it really seem reasonable to you that no one would notice how entirely unprofitable (hypothetically) the investment is? Over the course of a dozen+ years!?

It could quite easily be one high-ranking manager who decided and pushed through such a campaign, and now uses company money to pay for research that "proves" its success and enables him to brush off those who doubt it but lack similar clout.

This kind of thing is par of the course for company politics. But probably unlikely to persist this long.

Just depends on whether or not the results are meant to public consumption. I find it hard that no one at Visa would want an honest study from time to time, but I can also easily believe that sometimes studies are commissioned with the end-goal being to justify an already set-in-store decision.

He wasn't asking 'why sponsor the olympics', he was asking 'why take the exclusive angle'. Saying 'they've been doing it for years' does not answer that.

Saying "they've been doing it for years" implies that it probably works. That is the answer (well okay, it's his answer)

That's basically a "Monkey Cage" answer.

http://paws.kettering.edu/~jhuggins/humor/banana.html

Funny but not very enlightening. This isn't a case of generations of companies still following the same pointless habits (wearing suits and ties, etc). If those monkeys were responsible for monitoring a return on a 700 million dollar investment, I think that one of monkeys would try to investigate the situation further. Also, I think science suggests humans are smarter than monkeys [citation needed].

A lot of us in Vancouver really resented the "only accepts Visa" thing. It was particularly aggravating in Canada where most people pay with a bank debit card, not Visa or Mastercard.

That said, it's not surprising that the overall effect of the sponsorship was positive since refusing MasterCard and debit was only one small aspect of Visa's campaign. Reading about this again in London made me all riled up again, but Morgan Freeman's soothing voice will likely undo the damage soon enough.

My bank debit card... IS Visa. I don't think I would have been able to get one that wasn't.

In Canada, debit cards are run by a not-for-profit venture founded by the major banks called Interac. Everybody's standard ATM bank card is usable as a debit card. This is the most common method of payment in the country.

It's the same in Europe.

Not in the UK... most of our debit cards are Visa or MasterCard

Same in Sweden as well.

I think you are misleaded by the branding on your debit card. Most transactions are not going through Visa, but a third-party solution that the banks them selves run. I might be wrong, but I think Nets delivers the solution in most of northern Europe. They call it NetAxept.

This is a direct pay solution used with online terminals, the Visa/MasterCard-part of your debit card is just for offline transactions or credit.

There are quite a few different payment processors here (Nets, PayEx, BABS, Dibs...), not really sure about how the backend works between banks. My card works in anything with a Visa logo, but there's no credit connected to it.

I don't get it. NetAxept appears to be some kind of payment processor for web shops; certainly not something a bank would use for its internal processing.

It would be the height of stupidity for Mastercard and Visa to allow banks to issue cards with their labels and then have these cards be part of some secret "strictly Northern Europe" Mastercard/Visa network. Talk about confusing the customers.

But this is all moot: I have both Mastercard and Visa debit cards issued in Sweden. They work perfectly well outside of Europe...

In Finland the banks recently dismantled the old debit card system and forced everyone onto the insecure (EMV based) and expensive Visa/MasterCard branded debit cards. You still sometimes see the old cards but banks have stopped issuing new ones.

And Australia (EFTPOS)

That is completely besides the point.

I'm sure people appreciate VISA's Olympic sponsorship, there is little question about this. Exclusive sponsorship if different from limiting the choices of vendors and customers.

People do not like being limited in their choices, I do not think that benefited them.

> Visa's market research suggests a significant increase in Visa usage and Visa brand value among consumers aware of their Olympic sponsorship.

Couldn't this be that heavy-Visa users notice the company's sponsorship and usage more generally? This doesn't really prove that Olympics sponsorship increases usage.

> The same report found Visa’s brand equity was higher among consumers who were aware of Visa’s sponsorship.

Again, couldn't it just be that the kinds of people who notice that Visa sponsors things are the kinds of people who already like Visa? This doesn't establish that sponsoring the Olympics helps Visa.

"Again, couldn't it just be that the kinds of people who notice that Visa sponsors things are the kinds of people who already like Visa?"

Could be, but it's highly unlikely that a company who does surveys as its core business doesn't know this and tries to control for it, or at least explain it in they methodology section of the report they deliver.

I'm not sure I even understand what is being reported. I have little doubt that the opposite could be demonstrated with equally valid numbers. And did they also survey for spectator displeasure?

If spectator displeasure was a problem on the scale Visa could care about, then brand equity among those surveyed would have gone down instead of up. Why would they care to survey that directly? What matters is whether the sponsorship is a net gain for the Visa brand or not. The research says it is, big time.

Right, but being a Olympics sponsor is mainly something people find out about on TV, not by actually going to the games.

Where is the evidence that actually preventing people from using mastercard helps?