The thing about Visa is that they let you do very good work," says Jimmy Siegel, vice chairman/senior executive creative director at BBDO New York. "You know that if you come up with something that’s interesting and fresh, you have a better than even shot at getting it through the client."
Siegel ought to know. In the 10 years that he’s overseen the Visa account, he’s created nearly 40 spots for the credit card company. Though the subject matter has ranged from hilarious—Charlie Sheen aging into Martin Sheen while waiting for a check to clear in the recent "Sheens" for the Visa Check Card—to deeply moving—the post-Sept. 11 homage "Broadway Tribute"—the Visa ads have one thing in common: they are, indeed, interesting and fresh. "I think, to a great extent, it’s a tribute to the writing," says David Frankel, senior VP/associate director of television production, who has produced several Visa ads. "Also, Visa has diversified tremendously. There are debit cards, platinum cards, sponsorships for the Olympics, for the NFL, for the Tony Awards. It provides an opportunity to do quite a large, diversified body of work."
One of the latest—and funniest—entries in that body of work is the aforementioned "Sheens." Directed by Allen Coulter of bicoastal/international hungry man, the spot continues the trend of irreverent celebrity endorsements for the Visa Check Card that began in 1997 with "Bob Dole," a spot helmed by James Gartner of bicoastal GARTNER, shortly after Dole lost the presidential election to Bill Clinton. In that ad, Dole visits a small town where several denizens, including a waitress at a coffee shop, recognize the former Senator. When he asks to write a check for his tab, however, the same waitress asks for some ID.
"When we first began the campaign, the idea was that even the most famous people in the world have to show ID if they try to write a check," Siegel relates. "Even though we’ve evolved somewhat over the years, [the check card campaign] is still fundamentally about the hassle of writing a check. From time to time, we go back to our celebrity roots."
Like "Bob Dole" and the ’02 Super Bowl spot, "Bacon"—a clever play on the "six degrees from Kevin Bacon" idea featuring the actor himself, and directed by hungry man’s Bryan Buckley—"Sheens" pokes fun at its featured star. Besides aging into his father, Charlie Sheen is also shown writing a check to purchase three videos of his own films, and striking out with a female customer while waiting for his check to be approved. (The two other spots in the package, "Barbers" and "Jane’s Fan," feature, respectively, Tiki and Ronde Barber, identical twins who play for the New York Giants and Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the National Football League, and actress Jane Leeves of Frasier fame; "Barbers" is for the Check Card, while "Jane’s Fan" is part of a holiday spending promotion.) "When we use celebrities, we don’t just use any celebrities and plug them in," Siegel observes. "We use a celebrity because it tends to fit with an idea. And generally, we tend to use them in a somewhat self-deprecating way."
According to Frankel, the Sheens were happy to oblige: "They were very gracious on set, and they gave us one hundred and fifty percent." Although the actors were given director approval, they ultimately went with the agency’s choice. "The Sheens had a couple of suggestions, but we offered up Allen," Frankel says of the spotmaker, who has also directed episodes of HBO’s The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Sex and the City. "I think Martin and Charlie appreciated his incredible experience with episodic television."
While Siegel says Coulter was hired because of that experience, as well as for a campaign he helmed for Budweiser out of DDB Chicago, the creative team also liked his collaborative approach. "In the case of this commercial, we wanted a lot of input from a director," Siegel explains. "The joke itself happens at the twenty-five second mark, when you see Martin. The question is, how do you make it entertaining from second one to second twenty-five? We needed funny things to happen while Charlie’s waiting, and Allen was very instrumental in helping us come up with those."
Like many of the Visa spot helmers, Coulter was tapped without previous BBDO experience. "I love to try new guys because that’s how you keep things fresh," says Siegel, who joined the agency in ’79 as a junior copywriter. "Although I certainly have my input as far as which director we choose, I usually listen to the teams that work for me," he relates. "It’s great because they tend to look for the up-and-coming directors, just as I did when I first came up in the business."
The styles of the Visa directors are as varied as the ads themselves. Comedy specialists like Buckley, Coulter and Frank Samuel of Harvest, Santa Monica, have shot the Check Card ads. (Samuel directed the aforementioned "Barbers," in which a confused clerk asks the gridiron stars for photo ID.)
But for "Traffic," "Mountain" and "Surfing"—three striking, action-oriented spots touting Visa’s sponsorship of the ’02 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah—BBDO called on Klaus Obermeyer, a ski apparel scion-turned-director, who directs spots out of bicoastal Flying Tiger Films. "He was brought to me by the team," Siegel recalls. "Above all else, we needed a real shooter for those spots, and he had a very beautiful, very visual reel."
Despite their love of variety, Siegel and Frankel aren’t opposed to giving repeat business to directors. David Cornell of bicoastal Headquarters has shot such memorable Visa spots as "Chalice"—a gold card ad shot on location in Ireland—and "Synchronized Commercialism," an Olympic endorsement featuring synchronized swimmers spelling out the company’s name. "David has done a great deal of Visa work—as well as work on other accounts—here," Frankel says. "He has a great visual sense, the production is always top-notch and he always goes the extra mile. David is one of those directors who—if he doesn’t achieve what he is after—will get it without asking the agency to dig further into their pockets."
Both Siegel and Frankel count last year’s stirring "Broadway Tribute" as a career highlight. Directed by Gregor Nicholas of bicoastal/ international @radical.media, the spot—a re-edited version of the Tony Awards sponsorship ad "Broadway Poem"—earned a ’01 Emmy nomination for best primetime commercial. (Nike’s "Move," directed by Jake Scott of bicoastal RSA USA, via Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore., won the award.)
In this post-Sept. 11 spot, Nicholas’ wistful, black-and-white footage of Times Square habitués is accompanied by a haunting version of "Give My Regards to Broadway," as performed by Judy Collins, and the tag, "The curtain will never go down on New York City."
"It came out of a conversation with the client about one week after Sept. 11," Siegel remembers. "We kept thinking, ‘Is there anything that we can do, just to try to make people feel better?’ We had this footage from the original commercial, a lot of which we hadn’t used. So we said, ‘Maybe Broadway could be a metaphor for New York itself,’ because Broadway was hurting, certainly as much as New York was at that point.
"I had heard Judy Collins do a version of ‘Where or When,’ which was just absolutely heartbreaking," he continues. "And [bicoastal] music house Face the Music, which we deal with a lot here, had a relationship with [Collins]. So, I called them, and she was glad to do it. The whole thing was literally done in three days, a week-and-a-half after Sept. 11, and people really responded to the ad. Visa got so many emails from people who were finally able to let their emotions out. Being a New Yorker my whole life, it felt really good to do something that made people here feel a little bit better."
As for future Visa work, Siegel and Frankel prefer not to reveal specifics. "It’s hard to say what we’re going to do at this point," says Siegel, who has meanwhile found time to write his second novel (Derailed, due out in February from Time Warner Books). "With Visa, we’re always looking to see how we can improve. We’re always looking for the next thing."
