• September 22, 2009

Visa has renewed its longstanding sponsorship with the National Football League through the 2014 season. An NFL sponsor since the 1995 season, San Francisco-based Visa will be the exclusive payment service for the NFL and all official NFL events.

The sponsorship includes new benefits such as top-tier sponsorship of the NFL Draft and NFL Kickoff, exclusive experiences for clients to utilize in their Visa card marketing programs, Visa and NFL co-branded online portal on NFL.com for Visa Signature cardholders to obtain access to one-of-a-kind NFL experiences, and an expanded presence and preference for NFL-related transactions through various sales channels.

Visa will unveil an NFL-themed national TV ad campaign with extensions across multiple environments this fall. Throughout the season, print ads will also appear in in-stadium game-day team programs of Visa-sponsored teams as well as in Pro Bowl and Super Bowl programs. Digital ads highlighting Visa's national promotion and merchant offers will also appear throughout the season across a variety of Web sites including ESPN.com, Yahoo.com, SI.com, Amazon.com and Buy.com.

The campaign includes participation from financial institution clients that issue Visa cards and merchant partners that accept them. About 600 financial institutions and merchants currently utilize Visa's sponsorship of the NFL and generated 32 million pieces of communication for their customers. --Tanya Irwin