Visa Europe: Cashfree and Proud, Complete With Celebrities

March 23, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Normally the words “cash-free” and “proud” don’t ordinarily go together.

Being without cash for any length of time can engender conditions like homelessness or starvation.

Visa Europe is bringing the two together—and calling in some celebrity firepower—to help promote its cash-free program use among those who may not be in on the action right now.

Calling in Joanna Lumley and Brian Blessed—Rowan Atkinson fans will immediately recognize the latter as Black Adder‘s King Richard—Visa Europe plans to run the campaign starting this month and ending up sometime in May.

The campaign is poised to focus on “ease and simplicity of use,” and plans a full-court press of media targets including radio, digital and social, as well as outdoor advertising at “high impact sites.” Cashfree and Proud is specifically targeting “light contactless users,” as well as those who aren’t already putting the service to work every day.

The Visa Europe campaign isn’t a bad idea on the surface. Getting out the word about a service that some users may not be actively putting to work is far from a wrong move.

However, it could be that it’s focusing on the wrong problem. We’ve seen a lot of mobile payment studies so far, and one of the universally biggest problems is not ease of use; it’s security.

There’s a certain advantage in emphasizing ease of use, particularly for occasional or limited users, but there’s likely plenty of others out there who aren’t using the system because they don’t think it’s safe.

If Visa Europe focused instead on safety, it might well get better results than it would going after ease of use.

That’s strictly supposition, of course, because we won’t even know the results of the first campaign probably until sometime in June, let alone what a comparative, safety-focused, campaign would realize.

Visa Europe’s Cashfree and Proud program will likely draw at least some new users, especially piggybacking on celebrity as it is.

Though perhaps it’s targeting the wrong angle, it’s making a good case for itself with total non-users, and that may prove enough in the end to bulk up its roster and give it an edge in the market.