• by Danielle Oster , March 3, 2025

The road to awards recognition is inevitably a long one for those who win Oscars, dating back not just the years it took to produce their winning project, but the time for their own creative development.

Visa taps into that idea with its “Typewriter” campaign, centered around a cinematic  spot that  ran in both 60-second and 30-second iterations during ABC's Oscars broadcast March 2, after debuting across various digital and social channels Feb. 27.

The ad opens on a young woman  drawn to a vintage typewriter in a shop window, and then leaves open the creative possibilities unlocked by the purchase, following several possible pathways for the character. These include a writing career leading to a successful film adaptation, and developing a popular travel blog, which leads to needing a vacation from writing about vacations.

“By airing the film during the Oscars, we are able to mirror our protagonist’s journey, reinforcing the connection between every transaction and the steps toward success,” the brand explained in a blog post about the ad.

As befitted an ad running against the Academy Awards, it  was also shot with more cinematic flair (and presumably a higher filming budget) than the typical credit card ad. The media placement wasn’t cheap, either. According to Statista data, a 30-second spot during the event in 2024 cost around $2.2 million.

The ad will continue running through Q3 2025, a Visa representative told Marketing Daily. It will be supported by a trio of 15-second  films tying the brand to travel, ecommerce, and everyday spending, as well as content from influencer marketing partnerships running across Instagram and TikTok focused on personal stories reflecting the power of "that one purchase," a la "Typewriter."

The campaign builds on the messaging introduced in Visa’s “Prodigies” campaign launched last June, which ran during the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and featured celebrities such as Pharrell Williams, Daniel Ricciardo, and Roy Choi. An analysis of Olympics advertising by the ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing found it to be one of the most  “inclusive and culturally resonant” ads broadcast during the events.

It’s also part of a broader attempt by Visa to “breathe new life” into its iconic “Everywhere you want to be” tagline “to reflect the aspirations of modern consumers,” through messaging that  “It’s not just about where you’re going; it’s about who you’re becoming,” as the brand put it in its blog post about the “Typewriter” campaign.

The move away from the tagline’s associations with physical ubiquity may be appealing to the brand for other reasons, too. Last year, the Department of Justice filed  an antitrust lawsuit against Visa, Inc., alleging that “more than 60% of debit transactions in the United States run on Visa’s debit network, allowing it to charge over $7 billion in fees each year,” and that the company “wields its dominance, enormous scale, and centrality to the debit ecosystem to impose a web of exclusionary agreements on merchants and banks.”